| deutsch |english |
Open Sky
Exhibition of works by Joachim Kersten at Sparkasse Haßfurt
For this exhibition, titled „Open Sky“, Joachim Kersten has compiled works from different work cycles of the last eight years, large-format canvasses and a series of smaller paper works, some of them very recent ones which were created in Fort Worth, Texas, where the painter has been living and working on and off for some years now, splitting his time between there and Nuremberg. So here we can find out where Kersten has arrived on his journey to the stars. And we can verify to what extent “Open Sky” can be read as the central concept of a free artistic self-conception that, with mild hubris, will not be measured against anything less than the open sky.
So let's try to approach these works by simply perceiving them for a start.
The very first impression they evoke is definitely that of an extremely vital colorfulness, an abundance of color even. Masterful chords of yellow, orange and red dominate many works in constantly new refractions and variations. In between, flashes of iridescent green or chiseled, defiant midnight blue; occasionally a shellac brown, sometimes tarry, sometimes transparent, swims towards us.
As vibrant and energetic as these colors seem to come along, as finely woven, even fragile and scrupulous are they composed en détail, however, as if to always make their coloristic counterpart shine through them at the same time, or maybe even the whole complex variety of their combinatory possibilities, sounding them out, so to speak, visibly and comprehensibly, for possible areas of resonance, until finally the one harmonious chord of color evolves before the painter's critical eye.
Being able to look at the original paintings is definitely an advantage. One can step up closer, stick one's nose deep into the paintings and, doing so, realize that all those color areas are anything but homogeneous. Not one shade lives, exists or shines only out of itself here, everything varies in finely nuanced shades and countershades, in multiple layers and intermixed colors occasionally still indicating a sweeping brush stroke, however much more often giving testimony of the patient interplay between applying and removing, intensifying and diminishing, out of which Joachim Kersten develops his colorscapes in concentrated, stratigraphic, counter-archeological work, as it were. This kind of work leaves its traces and subtle effects. Here, time has been transformed – in the proverbial as well as the metaphorical sense – into a depth of space from which it shimmers counter-suggestively from time to time, as if from far away.
If one has approached the paintings already, it's worth casting a glance at another characteristic feature of Kersten's work: the plastically prepared background, where all play of colors takes place. Joachim Kersten binds blasting grit with acrylic and, doing so, applies flat reliefs to his canvasses even before applying the colors. If things get too colorful, he uses the hand sander to make them vanish again, just to apply a second or even a third layer then anyway, if necessary. Thus a tangible, concrete plafond with various and totally contradictory effects develops. He captures and positions the light three-dimensionality of the paintings, provides them with a solid bedding and undercoat and at the same time lightly penetrates them, he roughens his paintings up to intensify their vitality and with delicacy adds an additional dimension – motivated by the art of painting –, which, depending on the incidence of light, dramatically changes the paintings, their materiality and their degree of translucency. Light and shadows, raw outlines alternating with fine ones, accentuate and soften areas of the paintings, thus emphasizing the unconventional, ever new features of the colorful landscapes. They limit the depth of the pictorial space and at the same time penetrate it, force it open and change its shape. On the one hand, they accentuate even the tiniest parcel, and at the same time provide the greater surface with a well-proportioned stability and background.
Another thing must be mentioned: The interplay between bright and dull, plane and raised figures, sometimes eroded as if by caustic acid, that Kersten incorporates in his works using diverse shellac resins in a special way. They, too, multiply the paintings' effects. Where, from far away, a certain pattern of light reflexes seemed to dominate the painting, only two steps closer a totally different pattern emerges and completely changes the impression of the painting.
Joachim Kersten knows how to carry to extremes the exploitation of all available tools of painting in a subtle as well as consistent manner. Here, the art of painting comes at you from all sides. So, having seen his works in one light only, from just one perspective, simply means not having seen them at all. There is not one photographer who hasn't despaired of this multiperspectivity of Kersten's paintings. Therefore here comes again: If you are fortunate enough to see the originals, make full use of it.
Everything we have so far contemplated individually, that is, colors, textures, images, obviously are in Joachim Kersten's paintings subject to a spatial planning, a clear inner order using elementary basic principles while at the same time varying them in manifold ways. The carefully divided pictorial space, often layered in vertical or horizontal streaks, the frequent light and dark counterpoints, the beams, struts and lines protruding into the painting laterally here, upright there, sometimes imperious, sometimes delicate, the surfaces (gained from color as well as surface texture) often set against each other abruptly, then again in a blur, and the play with extreme or multipart formats – all those are determining principles of construction in Joachim Kersten's paintings. Sure enough, there are no simple layouts. The constructive order is never an end in itself, either, but always serves the painter's superior ends, such as charging the paintings with a vital inner tension, spatializing and animating the painting's story. “A pulse instead of construction, color resonance instead of addition”: this is what Joachim Kersten noted in his sketchbook, a concise declaration of what is essential to him.
Into these finely joined virtual spaces, which Kersten builds again and again (and always in a new way) with seemingly never ceasing energy, figures have been placed here and there, woven into these spaces like freely floating organisms, or growing from them like “Arabesques” (to use a term he once liked to apply), fragments of maybe floral or botanical provenience, sometimes almost physical hints, which can be read as reminiscences of an outer nature without seriously materializing the paintings, holding points for the wandering eye, an anamnestic reflection of a material outside world, but always primarily determined by their formal quality in the whole of the painting. In the work cycle titled “Labyrinths” round figures appear in crowded flocks and multiform aspects. Throughout this cycle the basic forms of circle and oval have developed and permuted into dented drops, amphorae, vessels; structures that Kersten spreads before us like pretentious, not to say capricious, maybe even malign archivalia with a disturbing life of their own, cellular organisms torn from their tiny, strange worlds and placed into the transparent light, as if under a microscope. They interact freely in a diffuse space, side by side, or one behind the other, or against each another, sometimes also chained to one another by lines in a seemingly insecure and helpless order, like in a flow chart providing a deceptive kind of safety – or might it be more appropriate to look at the open sky and talk about pulsing meteoric celestial bodies, boulders made of ice and stone, traveling coldly and majestically around their orbits?
Be that as it may: In his best works, Kersten effortlessly reaches a degree of differentiation, animation and consolidation of the paintings that allows the beholder to linger in them in a moment of highly concentrated perception and to reach ever new outlooks and insights from them. If one knows that high medieval painting and the art of the illuminators is one of the guiding stars in Kersten's painter's heaven, one cannot be mistaken to see secular devotional pictures in his works, which in all abstraction are highly emotional and, in my personal opinion, of an extreme (inner) reality. Devotion, if for once taken without its religious overtones, meaning attentio – the spiritual contemplation of an object – would therefore also be the only right way of encountering them. These paintings want us to walk by slowly, to come back, to regard them with patience. They cannot be comprehended, let alone fully grasped, in passing.
It might be best to live with them.
Dr. Hans-Jürgen Stahl, Kist
Translation Elke Neubauer
------
Human beings change from day to day and even from minute to minute. A painting, once finished, does not change. A Joachim Kersten painting, however, is so complex, so interactive, and so subtle that one can examine it carefully before turning away for a moment or for a decade, then turn back to what seems to be a new work of art. As one shifts position to the right or left, new effects of light are thrown into relief. Ideas, details, and even whole forms, unnoticed before, tease their way in and out of the field of vision. The artist devotes long hours to each piece, and the result is a work of art that rewards long and continuous viewing.
Kersten is an attentive student of the natural world, but he gives no clue of its appearance in his work. Instead, he bypasses the surface and somehow gets inside the very workings of nature. Like a tumbling mountain stream, his paintings have a reflective surface that gives way to luminous depths. Color pools up like dappled light through treetops; its circular shapes suggest raindrops or sunspots, echoes of thunder, or the steady pound of a heartbeat. The constant interplay of light and dark, microcosm and macrocosm evokes both subatomic particles and galaxies. Contrast and contradiction create emotional intensity; sharp changes in scale, from sweeping, mural-sized canvases to more intimate pieces, keep the viewer's mind in motion.
As nature engenders, dissolves, and regenerates, so Kersten constructs his work. He prepares each canvas with a rough, geological surface of modeling paste and plaster in very thick and very thin layers, building it into an organic composition before he adds additional layers of acrylic paint and shellac that create space and depth. He lays down veil upon veil of lucent brush strokes that hint at windswept deserts or sunlight glinting off the ocean. He improvises intuitively, at times disregarding the original surface so that a disc of transparent color may overlap but not entirely coincide with a circular rough shape. This interface might recall the markings of a seashell or a fragment of amber. It mimics a retinal afterimage; it may appear to wax and wane like the moon.
Kersten divides his time between Fort Worth, Texas and his native Nuremberg, Bavaria, where he has been accorded great honors as an artist. An invitation from the city of Schweinfurt, Bavaria inspired a series of five shows called Digitalis Purpurea. The first group, which opened in an exhibition space in a mid-sixteenth century city hall, seamlessly joined contemporary consciousness with massive, ancient architecture. Subsequent exhibits in the series are now traveling to museums and galleries in other German and American cities, including the current show at William Campbell Contemporary Art in Fort Worth.
Kersten maintains an active, lifelong relationship with every work of art he creates. “I can't always remember what state I was in when I painted a certain piece,” he says, “but when I see it years later, something will grab me. I look forward to this. I want to be surprised again, like I was the first time. It seems that there is always something more.”
Suzanne Deats, William Campbell Gallery, Fort Worth 2007
------
Painting is not explaining the world, but seeing it, forming it.
Paul Valéry
The paradox of painting is that it invites the spectator into its room to look at the world beyond.
John Berger
Traveling inspires. So does reading, which is an abstract kind of traveling.
And both involves collecting, collecting impressions.
Traveling, reading, collecting – essential parameters for Joachim Kersten.
The painter is never without his camera, capturing landscapes, formations, fragments for his “photographic sketchbook“, which will then evolve into ideas of color and form.
The cycle of works of the “Honigsucher“ (1999) signalizes a significant extension of Joachim Kersten's palette, which prevails throughout his new group of works “Labyrinths“ and had its breakthrough with the large format key painting, the first of this series from 2003. While his earlier paintings had an almost classical calm, the new compositions have superseded the strictness, sharpness and geometry, in mostly subdued colors, of earlier paintings with their forceful, almost provocative colorfulness. One can feel a pulsating power, reflecting the artist's intention of “transporting effects and energies“ in his paintings, of making emotion visible and the light of landscapes (e. g. of the south of the USA) perceptible.
The structure of his paintings has basically remained as it was: the prepared underground in multi-layer tectonics, the individually treated, repeatedly overpainted surfaces with construction lines depicting landscapes, the horizontal division of the work and the complementary painted surfaces being still the basis of each work. What has changed is the paintings' tone, their tone of color and canon of forms. Their characteristic features now are the emphasis on painted elements, the superimposed system of circle, oval and organic-looking forms and their interactions. There is also a new quality to the ever-recurring small codes and brushstrokes functioning as tokens of reality, figurative annotations or abstract thoughts.
There is a new dynamic especially to the latest paintings of the labyrinth group of works in extreme landscape format (2005). The individual elements dominate the painting and at the same time seem to be determined by and woven into the surrounding and underlying color energies. Oval, sometimes flattened shapes extend from side to side like independent organisms, making for lively horizontal movement and occupying the whole of the painted surface like molecules on a strip conductor, a test tube or, as the artists himself describes it, a “speed tube“.
Parallel to the “Labyrinth“ group of works, smaller works on paper have emerged in recent years which can be seen as preparatory studies and are summarized under the title “Hierarchies“. The artist was inspired to create those after reading some of the mystic Jakob Böhme's texts, whose philosophical approach is based on the symbolical interpretation of all real experiences as the innermost reason for all being, and also through his views on the four basic elements water, fire, air and earth, whose interactions Böhme puts in hierarchical order.
These paper works already hint at how every “particle“, every circle or drawing element follows a principle set by the artist and therefore has a corresponding stabilizing or destabilizing effect on the widely developed discipline of colors. The superimposed surfaces form like an armada of flying discs or like holes in a membrane. Color, material, space. The delicately mixed palette gives form, determines color, even when shining gold or deep pink is used. The colors are mostly, however, packed next to each other in “neighborly fashion“. They are strikingly colourful and lively, seldom loud and gaudy, always extended by narratively apostrophized structures or materials such as shellac or blasting grit which produce cracked, abrupt surfaces.
There is a completely different effect, namely that of focussing on one of the above surfaces, to the compact, small-format diptyches, which, module-like, examine materials and colors.
Here, the fragments of impressions from the “photographic sketchbook“ are reshaped and reduced to geometrical wall objects, painted barriers, stick-like bars or monochromatic painted surfaces defining space, making it appear formal, clear, and friendly at the same time.
In relation to the pieces from Joachim Kersten's “traveling and reading luggage“ arranged on the canvasses, but also when talking to the artist about his work, one repeatedly comes across medical and biological terms: molecules, organism, circulation, agglomeration in the test tube and not least the book entitled “Digitalis purpurea“ – the foxglove, used to produce medicine for the heart.
In Joachim Kersten's paintings everyday impressions and minimalist poetry coexist, again showing that in all their complexity, the artist's paintings are about inner balance as opposed to superficial harmony.
In his latest works especially, he succeeds in letting his compositions grow into meditations about the pulse of life.
Petra Weigle, Nuremberg, 2006
------
When, in midsummer, the red foxglove blooms in clearings, the edge of the woods or, cultivated, in gardens, the tall-growing plants with their lush flowers do not only fascinate those who know the indigenous flora. But when looking at these extraordinary plants, we are well aware of their Janus-faced character. Digitalis purpurea is a toxic plant and therefore poison or medicine, with its effects directly depending on its dosage.
The artist Joachim Kersten, who lives and works in Nuremberg, Bavaria, and Fort Worth, Texas, chose the botanical name of the red foxglove as the title of his exhibition showing works from different series from the last few years. How strongly nature's ambivalence is reflected in his paintings, to what extent the title of the exhibition is an allegory for the intention of the objects shown, may be revealed by the confrontation with them and the interaction resulting from it.
The exhibition will be first presented in Schweinfurt, which has historical links to Nuremberg, among them its former status as a free imperial city. I am pleased that, at the beginning of next year, it can be shown at Schloss Almoshof. This venue will certainly be on a par with the Renaissancehalle of the Altes Rathaus in Schweinfurt. A very special feature of this exhibition is that – after being shown in Coburg – it will tour to two venues in the USA. Joachim Kersten's works will be presented in Fort Worth, his adopted city, and in Atlanta, Nuremberg's twin city, making the artist and his exhibition an ambassador of our city and certainly emphasizing the cultural exchange with our twin city.
I would like to thank Joachim Kersten for being a cultural ambassador, and also all the others involved in the realization of this exhibition in our country as well as in the USA. As for the exhibition itself: may the public welcome it with the enthusiasm it deserves.
Prof. Dr. Julia Lehner, Deputy Mayor for Cultural Affairs of the City of Nuremberg, 2006