Soft Guidance: Kim Bartelt, Adelheid De Witte and Annamarie Ho

The visual impact of paintings can be all consuming. By some strange alchemy, the elements (colour, texture and composition) comprising that flat rectangle hanging on the wall, coalesce, to replace will and intellect with sensation and emotion. Despite their contrasting techniques, the three artists featured in “Soft Guidance”, Kim Bartelt, Annamarie Ho, and Adelheid De Witte, understand that dynamic interplay between objective materiality and subjective resonance. Channeling the tensions and contradictions that lie between gesture and geometry, softness and rigidity as well as freedom and restriction: to turn that two-dimensional object into a three-dimensional experience, alive with intelligible, human vitality. 

Moving beyond the limits of their chosen medium, these three “so-called” painters eschew the obvious and foreground the unseen and unexpected. What links them is the pursuit of a new geometric vocabulary; forms that encapsulate their vision of contemporary life to reveal the submerged, presences that underlie existence. For Annamarie Ho, that hidden presence is in the politicised, hyper-commercialised systems. For Kim Bartelt, it is in the synthesised, compositional shapes that construct and obscure our perception of the world. For Adelheid De Witte, it is in capturing the unarticulated, the unexpressed.

At an earlier stage in Kim Bartelt’s career, she abandoned liquid paints to use planes of flat, often semi-transparent paper. Layering them to produce achingly minimal works that insist, gently but persistently, on the intrinsic relationship between colour, depth and space. Nowhere is this more apparent than in this recent series inspired by great works of the Renaissance. Works that both reduce and accentuate their original subject matter, injecting a kind of gestural romanticism through the language of squares and rectangles. Despite the compositional reduction of Bartelt’s Fra, 2022, the work loses none of the serene potency of Fra Angelico’s Saint Nicholas Altarpiece. In Please, 2022, Bartelt allows the gestural memory of the sculpture to inscribe an emotional value into her formally abstract work. Their geometric translation could so easily be distant and isolating, but with her lightness of touch, it triggers a deeper aesthetic response, preserving the sense of harmony that radiates from her work.

Having worked as a figurative painter for many years, Adelheid De Witte found herself increasingly drawn to the liberating possibilities provided by abstraction. Her technique of scratching and rubbing at the painterly surface, create a suggestive resonance that appears to both dissolve and solidify across the surface. In One Day (In Italy), 2023 and One Night (in Italy) 2023, she fosters an experience of equilibrium by counterposing geometric stricture on the periphery to the disorder of her more gestural paintwork, giving the works a powerful physical presence. The vivid, almost lurid painted edges are an integral and essential part of her composition. Their angular rigidity counterbalancing the miasma at their core. These more centralised areas resonate in a cloud of emotional perceptiveness; articulating the inexpressible and challenging the viewer to look deeper and with ever greater penetration. 

Flatness reigns in the fabric-covered canvases of Annamarie Ho. With their geometric shapes and angular symmetry, her works present formal and conceptual references to geometric abstraction, while simultaneously challenging the conventions of contemporary painting. Often alluding to the social and political tenor of the times – their flat planes of synthetic colour conjure the cacophonous forms and energy of consumer culture – they remain remarkably detached, imbued with an enigmatic, unresolved quality. In the body of work Tute, she draws on the design of Formula One racing suits. Despite being severed from the garish branding of the sponsors’ original logos and wordmarks, the resultant “fabric” paintings manage to both evoke the thrilling spectacle of Formula One and the commercialised banality of the culture existing behind it. Her work so often depends on the tension that arises from such juxtaposition, heightening further their charged, dynamic essence.  

Duncan Ballantyne Way