The Butterfly Effect

“Does the flutter of a butterfly's wings set off a whirlwind in one’s mind?”

Micha Patiniott creates minimalistic and atmospheric paintings of everyday objects and processes in flux, blurring the boundaries of the mundane and the cosmic. Familiar and intimate subjects, such as the blinking of a butterfly’s wings, the throbbing of intimate body parts, the curving of a mathematical object, and the turning of an ambiguous portrait, are transformed into sensuous otherness through painterly modifications.

Bodies and objects are in flux: things float and are in the midst of changing form, entirely absent, or in various states of becoming. These spectral presences blur spatialities, temporalities, and corporalities, where boundaries between inner experience and outer world become fluid. Patiniott’s hyper-focus on moments of transience reveals how small and seemingly insignificant events can hold personal significance while hinting at something beyond - on the level of the macro, the universal, or the sublime.

Patiniott explores most motifs in series, resulting in kindred images in transformations that reveal patterns, echoes, and divergences. They imply cyclical ideas such as forms of entering, expanding and contracting, breathing, turning, pumping, shimmering, shifting, reflecting, birthing, transforming, and repeating. The play of light and color is essential: careful atmospheric shifts in brightness and transparency bring about a contemplative sense of vibrancy and allude to a contemporary take on historical painting techniques like impressionism and sfumato. A restrained palette of mono or duo chrome colors is juxtaposed with a shifting of local colors to the psychedelic. Objects are shown individually or repeated in rhythmic patterns, often zoomed in on and decontextualized by placing them in enigmatically empty surroundings.

Familiar imagery is repositioned by withholding or emphasizing details in combinations that seduce to a slowed-down scrutinizing. Some parts are strongly blurred and suggest movement, a going out of focus, or a transformation into abstract ambiguity. In contrast, other parts are sharply defined, with crisp details and bright highlights, as an analog to the concentration of the eye.