— Unearthly

2020 Association for Visual Arts Gallery Cape Town

With inventive and pioneering use of the encaustic or wax painting technique, Lötz mines the primordial soup behind identifiable matter to produce alien scenes that seek to revive a sense of wonder in our surrounding natural world. The collection of gestural, non-literal matterscapes avoid easy depiction and instead express a tacit dialogue between the subject matter and his emotional response to it.

To this end, Lötz’s work riffs on the Michael Polanyi line: We can know more than we can tell. His approach abandons the idea of a supposedly realist picturesque depiction of the world, celebrating the indeterminate nature of a place filtered by the imperfect mind. These paintings and sculptures address both personal and global concerns as the artist probes at nature’s indifference, prowess and vulnerability and tracks its endless cycles of growth, decay, destruction and renewal.