Beira do tempo [Edge of Time], Thiago Hattnher’s first solo show in Brazil, is the result of a persistent, meticulous relationship with painting.

The artist proposes slow, attentive builds. He is in the habit of working on multiple canvases at any given time, not knowing beforehand what the piece will look like. Utilizing oil paint, which is slow to dry, he superimposes layers, creating fields of color and form that oscillate between harmony and imbalance, articulating with one another in a provocative interplay between neutral zones, areas that suggest abstract games or imaginary landscapes, lines that simulate horizons, quotes that hark back to landscapes or to the still life genre, thus evoking the history of painting.

These pieces of work, Hattnher points out, are driven by atmosphere more so than by narratives, an aspect the artist chooses to underscore by opting not to give them titles or isolate them with frames. By leaving the edges visible, he lends visibility to the layers of colors (lime green, fluorescent orange…) which come together to create a misty look that is hard to define.

“It is a line of thought that is reluctant to fixate on an idea and attain its final form,” sums up Julia de Souza in the critical text for the Edge of time exhibit.” Hattnher’s cogitation is closer to thought, meditation, and preparation than it is to calculation,” she adds. Far from being a tool for telling stories, showcasing virtuosity or constructing precise logic, technique becomes a persistent daily investigation that creates a kind of broadened temporality. “This brings a slowness in reading which I like the artwork to have,” says Hattnher.

This temporal deceleration flies in the face of contemporary immediatism. It harks back to memory like a blurred recollection, he notes. When viewed together, the pictures challenge spectators, inviting them to uncover links and particularities within each of them as well as in the dialogue between the various works, in a ceaseless motion of coming together and coming apart, autonomy and synthesis.

The exhibition establishes a profound dialogue with pictorial tradition yet at the same time subverts it, turning technique into a field of experimentation and reflection. The formats are usually small and modular. There is only one slightly larger canvas, 1.4-meter-wide with a deep, atmospheric blue, where “the figure-ground impasse becomes exacerbated,” remarks Julia de Souza. The type of paint employed is the same, but the materials, techniques, and surfaces are diverse. Wood, linen, or more rustic jute absorb light and paint differently, toying with perception.

“Each surface enables me to summon up a different image,” he says. These variations in rhythm, intensity, duration – this wandering development, as he puts it – lend the artwork a “musical notation” feel, says Mateus Nunes, the current curator at MASP, in his critical text for Hattnher’s exhibit in London last year. Not by chance, the artist’s master’s dissertation at ECA-USP is suggestively titled Painting, Silence and other noises , and it addresses touchpoints between the work of John Cage and Cy Twombly and his own inquiries.

There is a permanent restlessness in the way Hattnher builds out his work. Painting has always been his language, since before he left São José do Rio Preto to study visual arts in São Paulo, in 2009. “I had never been introduced to other practices; this was all I knew,” he quips.