The phosphorus surface holds a potential. The painting is only activated by the memories the viewer brings to it.
"Mach mal piano" is a german saying, meaning something like "take it down a notch". A familiar, offhand invitation to slow things down, to ease off the pace. In music, piano is a dynamic marking: the same note, played at a different volume. Softer, more restrained, yet no less expressive.
For Thomas Wachholz, whose artistic practice has revolved around friction, energy, and transformation for more than a decade, this opens up a new perspective. In his first solo exhibition at PULPO GALLERY, the Cologne-based artist shifts the dynamics of his work. Colors become softer, gestures more focused, compositions more open. The energy remains. It simply reorganizes itself.
It all begins with a matchstick. An unassuming object designed for a single, irreversible moment. Friction produces fire; fire transforms matter. A brief hiss, a flicker of flame, and all that remains is a charred stick. From this elemental process, Wachholz has developed an artistic vocabulary that brings together painting, sculpture, chemistry, and performative processes. At its core are both the act of ignition itself and the question of what processes a single gesture can set in motion.
In his new series piano, presented here for the first time, this movement becomes a visual score. Colored rectangles, vertical marks, and rhythmic repetitions form sequences reminiscent of musical notation, digital codes, or the structure of an unknown language. At first, everything appears to follow an underlying order, yet that order gradually begins to shift, overlap, and dissolve. The compositions are precisely constructed, their dynamics emerging through variation. It is a play on expectations, exploring the relationship between system and deviation, repetition and change.
What appears as rhythm on paper takes physical form in the bronze sculptures of the TANZENDE series. As the matchsticks burn, their heads fuse together. Cast in bronze, a fleeting moment becomes a permanent form. The sticks lean into one another, seek balance, and form fragile constellations. Their almost human presence evokes figures caught mid-movement. Five dynamically choreographed sculptures, arranged along an elongated yellow plinth, unfold a choreography of their own, while the monumental work TAO translates this delicate interplay into an entirely different scale.
This choreography extends into the exhibition architecture itself. Wachholz has designed two colored display structures that resist the neutral function of conventional plinths. The elongated, sulfur-yellow and salmon-colored structure supporting the TANZENDE sculptures, in particular, asserts itself as an independent intervention in the space. A deliberate disruption that interrupts sightlines, directs movement, and establishes new relationships between the works. Its rectangular geometry echoes the formal vocabulary of the works on paper, translating their two-dimensional language into spatial volume. The exhibition itself becomes a composition in which image, sculpture, and architecture continuously inform one another.
The works from the LINIE and Monochrome series follow a similar logic of deliberate intervention and transformation. Using his own specially developed mixtures of red phosphorus, Wachholz turns paper and canvas into reactive surfaces. Striking a match becomes an act of mark-making. At times, it leaves minimal, almost rhythmically placed traces, accentuated by wisps of smoke that resemble a skyline on the horizon. Elsewhere, the ignition marks accumulate into an expressive gesture. The image becomes a record of an event, and time takes on a material dimension.
piano can be read as an open score. A constellation of forms, actions, and relationships that resists any single interpretation. Wachholz composes images, objects, and spaces, bringing controlled processes into dialogue with moments of unpredictability. Even disruption becomes part of a precise order. And with every movement through the exhibition, new connections emerge.
