LUMPEN VOID

LUMPEN VOID is a poetic excavation of absence, liminality, and the inadequacy of symbolic frameworks to capture the real. Herkenhoener’s practice arises from the wreckage of language, where articulation disintegrates, significance unspools, and raw experience defies systematization. At once a descent into interiority and a plunge into depth, the exhibition outlines a cognitive and sensory topography, a space of internal awareness that eludes the polished architecture of contemporary existence.
The title stems from the artist’s invocation of the “LUMPEN,” historically referring to those socially discarded by dominant structures, and the “VOID,” a dimension of pure negation where selfhood, remembrance, and utterance vanish and recombine. Within this conceptual duality, Herkenhoener operates as a kind of metaphysical interpreter, translating psychic debris into a vocabulary that belongs equally to verse, prophecy, and a mediumistic register, a liminal channel where visionary insight and lexical collapse intersect.
Influenced by sacred geometry not as formal perfection but as a shattered system, a broken code still resonating with metaphysical longing, and the uncompromising austerity of Malevich, Herkenhoener summons formal systems not as ideals but as fractured blueprints, broken sequences alive with esoteric tension. Emptiness, in his work, is never passive; it becomes a charged environment dense with covert architecture, hidden alignments, and psychic intensity. His canvases evoke the technique of surrealist frottage as practiced by Max Ernst, where surfaces expose buried terrains and silent histories inscribed in substance itself.
Through sculptural symbols, disjointed language, and severe visual grammars, Herkenhoener presents a constellation that confronts the observer with what endures beyond collapse. Rooted in conceptual rigor, his process unravels ideological machinery through speculative thought, treating speech not as clarification but as shifting ground navigated through exposure, disruption, and defiance. In this, his work asserts creative labor as a mode of emancipation, an act within a regime fixated on logic, speed, and control.
“I have invested my whole life in mapping the territories of a vast nothingness,” he writes, a sentence that serves as credo and operational stance. “After floating for so long in the dead space I realized that the void is charged with something, meaning.” Within this realm of negation, Herkenhoener’s investigation parallels the thinking of Georges Bataille, who claimed, “I believe that truth has only one face, that of a violent contradiction.” It is this dynamic between utterance and muteness, presence and disappearance, alignment and decay that animates LUMPEN VOID.
The exhibition manifests as a conceptual and verbal descent, sketching a zone where inherited blueprints, cultural, domestic and semantic, have fractured. In their aftermath emerges an uncertain syntax, ecstatic, fragmented and unfinalized. Herkenhoener resists synthesis, allowing splintered form to stand on its own, suggesting that out of disintegration, deeper realities may begin to cohere.