Willy Heeks, Abstract American Painter

Circumstance conditions and frames Willy Heeks’s paintings such that each is a lustrous inventory of its own particularity. Self-contained and seemingly self-generated, they inexhaustibly spin around an axis of potential: what a line can do, what a brush can do, where color can suddenly flash forth or melt away. Their contemporaneity lies in awareness that anything is possible that can be imagined as seen: sullied marks and atmospheres at the limits of the visual… The paintings of Willy Heeks industriously explore the pleasures of an optical sensuousness, embracing any memory or association encountered in the process. Miraculously, they remain abstract. Faye Hirsch, Arts Magazine, February 1991