Björn Heyn - Ätschi Bätsch

At first glance, his paintings appear playful, childlike, and fun, but upon closer inspection, they reveal themselves to be a rather complex interplay of reality and illusion.

Flower and fruit still lifes from classical art history meet seemingly naive forms of expression. It’s not just this act of civil disobedience—combining high and low—that brings pleasure. The fun factor also plays out as a veritable game of confusion in the mind.

Flowers in vases and fruit in bowls on tables—that is the truly super-classic still life, as we’ve known it for centuries from art history. It lives on in countless decorating tips and interior design ideas. And then there’s the table with the chairs, another theme that’s almost as old as humanity itself. We flood the various networks with recipes, social cooking events, and endless cooking shows. We invoke community, conviviality, and coziness. Food seems to be truly important.

In the works of Berlin-based artist Björn Heyn, the beauty of still lifes and the set table meet an unabashed love for colors and patterns, surfaces and forms, through which he reformulates the order of things in a direct way.

Like children, he places the three-dimensional objects in front of, next to, and on top of one another, without regard for three-dimensional spatial order.

Tables and chairs are, as in “we’d love a few more olives,” strictly viewed from the side or, at best, like the table in “sometimes I just paint flowers 5” or the blue chair in “can I have that, please? ”, rendered with perspective vanishing lines tapering into the depth or at an angle from above, but not perspectivally correct, rather somewhat awkwardly nested into the plane. He gives the round table in “Less Is More” four peculiar legs standing side by side, in the manner of children’s drawings.

Heyn often places images within his paintings that are clearly distinguishable as a separate pictorial plane, such as the blue table with chairs on a red background in the upper right quarter of “We’d love a few more olives” or the pink-red floral image with blue blossoms in “Sometimes I just paint flowers 5.” Here, however, the flower stems grow upward from the table standing in front of the picture, and the blossoms extend beyond the picture plane, where their edges are completed with colored pencil on the bare canvas, which has been primed only with a transparent base. So what belongs to the picture within the picture, and what to the picture itself, which depicts a room with a flower painting, a table, and a spherical vase figure standing in front of it?

Heyn further intensifies this interplay between the levels of reality and illusion by incorporating collage elements. For example, the dish towel on the table in “Sometimes I Just Paint Flowers 5” is a real one that he has glued into the painting; the vase figure is cut out in its entirety and not, as one might think, just the upper round shape, which looks like paper because it is white and features colored pencil scribbles on it. And the piece of cable or string arching in three loops in front of the table is not cut out and glued on, but painted and given a slight shadow, so that it only looks as if it were mounted.