In what he calls «butterfly» paintings, Grotjahn builds a sensory world, gripped by curiosity and wonder, the visible and the invisible, in which we encounter the specters of modernism, and indeed, in which we find our perception transformed
from pure optical
sensation into motive power and emotional energy.
These paintings do not belong to the category of abstract painting that moves far
from society and strives for
pure sensation but rather stand as circumstantial recordings of information, drawing together the complexity of social information and the purity of abstract painting and perhaps ultimately reducing different social, environmental, and individual actions into colors and shapes that represent different forms of information.