There is a flourish, a tumultuousness, in Petra Nimtz’s work that belies her paintings improvisational construction. Just as Kandinsky's "inner necessity" served as the carrier that drove this artist to produce his abstract work, the universal essence that underlies the pictorial self-sufficiency of Nimtz’s work resides in artist’s capacity to induce a certain state of internal contradiction that sustains her work’s integrity.

We see on one level, the pure medium of the brushstrokes and palette knives marks that roll and wave one upon the other, replacing, to a great degree, reference with effective expression, while coloristic interplay constantly evokes a liberation of the image from a narrative or symbolic reading, and insists on the autonomy of the two-dimensional picture plane evoking a transcendent realm of pure expression. Yet references to the outside world remain, if tactfully submerged, in the artist1s work.

Indeed one might even suggest that artist's forte is the aligning of abstract codes of abstraction with representational possibilities. What is remarkable with Nimtz's palette and mark-making capacity, then, is its elasticity, its capacity to cleave to any number of inferences that diverge from non-objective ones, while obstinantly staying within the regime of abstraction. For example, references to trees equally find their measure in the deep swirls of artist's morphing cascades of paint in her abstraction Autumn in Central Park, 2009. Yet the paint material itself is hardly prescriptive at all. In fact it is hardly over-determined in any real sense. It flows and flutters, pools and eddies as naturally and spontaneously as imagination itself out for a stroll.

On yet another level in her work sets up the contrasts in her gestural schema where the textures of dark brushstrokes deliberately interfere to create a visual resistance to the play of infinite depth seen in the color passages. As in many of her strongest works she creates a "dissociation of sensibility" with the ironic lack of relation between one feeling tone and another tone within her brush marks. This evokes a pictorial illusion of deep space, which is undercut by the artist's application of darker slashes of color. The result is a heightened drama of the pure "factness" of her paint materials that seem to have their own proud volition as they assert the flatness of the picture plane and the support surface as surface itself.

What we see, therefore is not exactly what we get. We get much more than what we bargained for. We feel contested territory in artist’s work. Optical roller-coaster effects are held in careful balance through the artist's sheer craftsmanship and, importantly, through her spontaneity allowing the spectator to enter the picture plane through multiple viewpoints. Artist’s paintings remind us that the poetry in good abstract painting is in its infinite potential to revitalize its dialog with the viewer, to resist immediate comprehensibility through formal inventiveness.

This inventiveness of transcendence that plays itself out so readily in Nimtz’s art is particularized through the ambiguities of scale. Scale plays an important role in apprehending sensorially the given object and its gestural components in its given context of origin. Artist's brushstrokes and spaces creates a system of signification through its conflating of the near and the far, the close-up and the far away, the miniature and the large. It becomes very hard to pin down definitively whether the eye is to place itself at a remove from the painterly action, so as if to give it more narrative play, or if we are immersed in action which occurs at a micrological, hence magnified, level. In the latter case, the piecemeal and personalized reading permits a greater sensation of mastery and of temporality. Analogies between us and our own status within a larger historical or social context will necessarily accrue as a residual reading of this temporal matrix.

As I had mentioned earlier, Nimtz’s's work pulses with vitality through its suggestive interplay between control and spontaneity. In Friedrich Schelling's words art "reflects for us the identity of conscious and unconscious activity. The basic character of the work of art is thus an unconscious infinity (synthesis of nature and freedom)." Such integrative aspect is at the heart of Nimtz's probing inquiry on the conditions of how we perceive and what we perceive. Because the senses are continually exalted in artist's paintings, a rare quality of poetic exaltation permeates Petra Nimtz's work, while her aesthetics is in this way raised to new, plastic heights.

John Austin is an art writer based in Manhattan.