Christian Hellmich is a Berlin-based painter whose work moves between intuition and control. Beginning with abstract, gestural marks, his paintings slowly develop toward representation without fixed narration, allowing for ambiguity and personal interpretation. Using architectural fragments, ornaments, and everyday details from a broad image archive as painterly material, he creates layered surfaces in which the absence of human figures places the viewer at the center. His work explores temporality, atmosphere, and a quiet sense of anticipation, with each painting considered finished when it can withstand the gaze—and return it.
Architectural fragments, ornaments, and everyday details permeate your images—how do you select these elements, and what stories do they tell?
I collect all kind of images, from newspaper images to discounter-advertisment to highart reproductions. Exclusions are rather rare and the criteria for the images is an openness: Can I use this image in a different context and will a painting based logic benefit from it? My works start from a very abstract and gestural point and representation only builds up slowly. There is no direct plan towards narration this way. Even though I think that every painting is abstract and it´s allways the question how much a painting accentuates this, I found mysellf beeing a representational painter at the same time. My goal is to balance a certain openess of the painting with enough material for narration, so every beholder can find his/her own story.
Nevertheless during the last years of this process my interest in images shifted towards a longing for romanticism here and the wish to describe reality there. I found people take up my work more with ideas of decline and remoteness. I guess that´s the influence by second wave french impressionists and the inherent feeling that something is about to happend in the next moment. I guess this changed to a "When night is the deepest, dawn is the nearest."
People are deliberately absent from your compositions—what effect is this absence intended to have on viewers?
The history of painting is a history of suffering flesh. The earliest decisions not to paint humans is based on this. It took me a while to find out how to deal with this on one side and my painterly interests on the other. The abscence of human representationmen in my paintings directly leads to the beholder and it´s own role in the process of reflection. I never wanted to be the authority who commands what to see in a painting. I pilled up stuff, subjects of pictures, until the mess felt like only humans can make sense of this.
Your painting thrives on layers and reworkings—how do you know when a picture has reached its final state?I stare at the painting and when the painting stares back for the same time, it´s finished.
Temporality plays a major role in your work—how would you like viewers to experience the “slowness” of your painting?
The best way to see painting is in the flesh. Go see some shows! You never know what sneaky allgorithms changed a digital image!
Where do you want your painting to take you in the coming years—what new questions or visual worlds do you want to explore?
I am just following blobs of paint and a trail I laid out.
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