The phosphorus surface holds a potential. The painting is only activated by the memories the viewer brings to it.
Thomas Wachholz, born 1984 in Cologne, works with the visual language of the matchbox. Many of his paintings carry real striking surfaces. He mixes red phosphorus to his own recipe, the same compound found on the side of a matchbox, and applies it to canvas, paper and wood.
The motifs come from matchbooks and postcards he collects in hotels, restaurants and petrol stations. As these objects disappear from everyday life, they take on a quiet nostalgia. Wachholz distils their stars, grids and colour fields into reduced, precisely built paintings, a practice often described as Conceptual Pop. In recent years the matchstick has also turned into bronze: cast oversized, blackened, and balancing like figures caught mid-movement.
Wachholz studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Katharina Grosse and Marcel Odenbach and graduated as Meisterschüler in 2016. He lives and works in Cologne.