Deni Lantz | Keeping Time
May 16 - June 28, 2025
High Noon is pleased to present Keeping Time, the US solo debut of São Paolo-based artist Deni Lantz. Rendered in a subtle palette with visible, meditative mark-making, Lantz’s new body of work is almost entirely non-objective, yet deeply connected to his lived experience in New York during his time at Residency Unlimited in the summer of 2024. As a temporary resident, Lantz treated the studio as a vessel— a place to process and internalize the overwhelming sensory input of the city, producing paintings that echo the textures, sounds, and pulse of urban life and folding it into quiet, physical form.
Keeping Time draws on the dual meaning of rhythm in music and the physicality of mark-making as a record of time, linking sound and movement. While in New York, Lantz immersed himself in jazz and its deep improvisational connections to samba, a style he regularly performs in São Paulo.
“Samba is not just a genre,” he explains. “It’s a story about the historical relations between cultures—the African and European influences on Brazil. Music is an abstract language, and how I relate to it is reflected in my work. I like the idea of painting as a score, where creating and observing generates a kind of internal rhythm.”
Emphasizing repetition, reduction, and a heightened awareness of surface and gesture, Lantz uses rhythm as a formal strategy to evoke presence without relying on narrative. His cross-cultural and sensory approach aligns with contemporary dialogues around multinational identity and the embodiment of self, positioning his practice within a lineage of artists who use abstraction not as an escape, but as a grounded, perceptual response to place, memory, and movement.
Favoring methodical marks with small brushes, the paintings remain intimate despite changes in scale. He incorporates beeswax as a medium, giving the surfaces a warm and sensual texture, creating a tangible contrast to fleeting sensory experiences. Additionally, the viscosity of the beeswax heightens the presence of the mark’s directionality, revealing a structural timeline. Often in the works, the brush strokes reach what Lantz calls a “pressure point,” wherein multiple strands of mark-making converge into a single location on the surface. As a compositional device, these areas of tension serve as resting points for the eye that bring attention to varied opacities, ghostly forms, and tonal shifts that reveal themselves slowly, exploring the delicate interplay between presence and absence.
Within the constrained parameters of Lantz’s practice is a surprisingly varied ecosystem of a minimalist formal language that registers differences like variations within an acoustic field. Viewers are encouraged to attune themselves to the subtle cadence of the paintings, generating a heightened awareness of shifts, suggesting how our environments imprint themselves on us both physically and psychologically.
Deni Lantz graduated in visual arts from Unicamp – State University of Campinas – SP. At age of 13 he studied painting with the Argentine artist Juan José Balzi (1933-2017). In 2012, he worked as an assistant to the artist Ernesto Bonato (1968) at Projeto Maré 0.1, as a printer of large-format woodcuts and apprenticed with the artist Paulo Pasta in 2020. His first solo exhibition in 2022, Deni Lantz: Painting with Galeria Estação, São Paulo - SP, Brazil coincided with his participation that same year in the group exhibition Let The World Come ‘Round? with Teffia Gallery, Kingston, New York, NY. Lantz has also exhibited at venues such as Gaia – Unicamp, Casa de Tijolo, and Casa da Xiclet Galeria in São Paulo. Notable residencies include a 2016 artistic residency and exhibition Barrer todo con Agua in Havana, Cuba, and a 2024 summer residency at Residency Unlimited in Brooklyn, NY.
