ZackZack style is marked by formal language of colour fields, geometric structures, and graphic motifs. The presence of stars, lines, and symbolic forms underscores the immediacy of visual signs, while the tactile qualities of the works, including unusual materials such as red phosphorus, impart a physical quality to the works that disrupts formal simplicity. Wachholz’s bronze sculptures of oversized matchsticks take his language into three-dimensional space, capturing the instant of ignition and motion.
The title of the exhibition, ZackZack, is German for “swift, resolute action,” underscoring the dynamism, rhythm, and conceptual clarity of Wachholz’s style. This exhibition, his second in Cape Town, marks Wachholz’s ongoing investigation into the potential of abstraction to convey moments of time, gesture, and physical intensity at once. Wachholz’s work explores the process by which everyday objects such as matchboxes and matchbooks come to be invested with personal memory and physical history.
