Eno Henze: The Man and the Machine

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There exists an undeniable link between the systems found in macrocosms and how they are mimicked, so handsomely, in microcosms. In his most recent exhibition, “Of Dark Matter and Gray Substance,” on view at Marion Scharmann gallery in Berlin, German artist Eno Henze has sought out a system to illustrate this symmetry and render the invisible visible through his graceful Marden-esque swoops and Twombly-esqe scrawls — created not by human hand, but by machine.

In Henze’s humble and fanatic hunt for the missing mass — that invisible energy swirling undetected through our observable universe — he invented a laser whose movements echo the elegance of the gravitational curve of our galaxy. One of the more evocative of his works incorporates the process of the machine in the presentation of the piece itself: A long strip of small bulbs — blinking at continuous and random intervals — pulses with the fervor and energy of a night club. After staring at the work for a few moments, you almost expect “Thriller” to begin playing over the loud speakers. But instead, the silent blinking continues, the room remains silent, and you begin to enter a state of hypnotic calm. In Henze’s own words: “I would argue that unconsciously we adopted reason as the general assessment basis when we talk about art, whereas art ultimately denies reason.”

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