Texte zur Arbeit

von

Stephan Berg

Hans Gercke

Christoph Bauer

Hans Gercke: Dynamic rigidity

Bloody battles were once fought over images. More precisely over the reality of images, and over the relationship between the reality of the portrayed object and that of the portrayal. It might seem today as if such battles were no longer fought but we should beware of jumping to conclusions: it is not that long since images seemed so threatening to those in power that they felt they had to ban them. Only recently, in an act of unheard-of barbarism the Taliban destroyed the "idols" of their Buddhist ancestors. And has there not been a (possibly justified) call recently for an end to the media dissemination of speculative images of brutality? Yet not so long ago it was images and not reports that fueled the global outrage against war and torture. And the topic is by no means exhausted there. We still accept at face value what images relate though we are well aware of the means of manipulation that existed long before the introduction of the new digital technologies. Images shape the horizon of our experience, and most people today still respond with incomprehension towards images that do not correspond to customary, referential expectations.

The development of art in the 20th century was defined by a move away from the mimetic ideal perfected in the course of centuries, and the establishment of the image as reality sui generis. Yet the image has always been more than a representation of reality, and ultimately it was precisely this uniqueness that allowed it to make statements on reality that went beyond its mere appearance. The very distance to the world outside the image reinforced its referential character, and subsequently – paradox as it might seem – radical verity can be experienced as something highly alien. This is certainly true of Thomas Kitzinger's oeuvre.

During the last century in ever more radical steps everything "alien", every representational aspect – the spatial, narrative – was eradicated; yet even when faced by such absolute or concrete painting this did not prevent the viewer from persisting in establishing associations based on his imagination and existing knowledge to the reality he knew. In Postmodernism, the object has returned to painting – in actual fact it never completely left it but was, at most, occasionally relegated to the periphery of the scene.

Or it disappeared from the picture, that had itself become the motif or subject removed from the usual context, ascribed a new presence and value as a work of art. Now liberated from the dictates of mimesis the image provided an ideal platform on which any manner of contextual shifts could be performed. Cubism with its collage-like addition of widely differing formal fragments and perspectives pointed the way – also for the future handling of the subject. In the early 1990s, Thomas Kitzinger availed himself of such methods, when critically elaborating on Ingres, he combined several levels of reality in an illusionist picture space. In the course of this development the context of the presentation assumed greater importance. Objects were combined to create room installations, pictures mutated into components of a comprehensive production. Essentially, altered premises produced the means for a new incorporation into a general context, as had been the custom in earlier epochs. For all that, this was by no means a simple restoration, but rather (and this likewise holds for Kitzinger's work), reversion to the representational – drawing on the knowledge related to its original abandonment. The criteria of autonomous painting were effectively applied to the new representational style. At first sight it might appear as if Kitzinger's paintings were something like a form of photorealism. However, what makes the production of the latter so interesting apart from the simple blow-up effect is the subtle translation of specifically medial phenomena to the traditional medium of painting, which is not an aspect of Kitzinger's paintings. If we consider Kitzinger's work against the background of the brilliant achievement of our more recent art history described earlier we can make the following observations: Kitzinger's painting cites that of the old masters by applying a supreme level of tradition and craftsmanship, which he takes to extreme lengths. Layer upon layer of clear varnish is applied, and the final smooth surface is subsequently treated with a razor blade to ensure the removal of every single trace of the painting procedure. The product of such handicraft gives the appearance of having been machine made, an impression further heightened in more recent paintings through the use of aluminum sheets as the medium.

Similar observations can be made about the subject matter chosen. Kitzinger's compositions continue on from the world of still life. The latter, in common with other categories of pictures, developed from the pleasing portrayal of sacred topics and finally established themselves as an independent category. At their height they combine the interest in the small things of everyday life with the enjoyment of being able to render them as perfectly as possible. With scientific exactitude not only zoological and botanical details are reproduced but the relationship of things to each other is also explored, their appearance and perceptibility in space, their material quality, and their behavior under the influence of light and shadow. It was above all the latter which made still life the preferred category for Chardin and Morandi, but the Cubists were also fascinated by these aspects and employed them to verify their new visual concept. Naturally, in older still life works there is an added metaphorical dimension, namely the polarity of vital plenty and transience which is addressed in the paintings.

Many apt comments have been made on the cold, alien quality Kitzinger's plates and mugs exude, on the outright refusal to even hint at a context and the purist smoothness of his paintings despite their meticulously illusionist reproduction. The viewer is confronted with a world to which he has no access but that nonetheless seems familiar to him. "In the diction of the artist things are given a foreign air, precision and accuracy we never noticed about them in real life," writes Stephan Berg. He continues "What we see is an individual thing in its isolation painted so lovingly and with such relentless accuracy, as if there were nothing else." Later, he comments: "In this context, painting a picture becomes a balancing act. It involves taking the subject seriously to the extent that it always constitutes a worthy occupant of the picture while imbuing it with so much fragility that it becomes evident it is only filling in the empty space surrounding it. (1)

The balancing act Kitzinger achieves renders in perfect trompe-l'oeil the surface of things, as it were as a remix of the essence and nature of their appearance. They are neither demonized nor alienated, their irritating foreign quality lies rather in their radical presence as painting. If we consider the evolution of this painting in terms of his works, it becomes apparent that both narrative and metaphorical elements – the alteration of light as an aspect of time, the change in a fruit to demonstrate its transience, but also the context of the objects portrayed are gradually eradicated. While plates and jugs once reflected the windows of a real, albeit empty room, in the more recent paintings the light reflex is retained to suggest the illusion of plasticity but its source can no longer be identified. The serial presentation of motifs stripped of their context lends the presentation a new association. Rigidity gives rise to dynamism, the stacked beakers produce something like Brancusi's never-ending column.

Friezes of paintings assume an architectural quality, the artist resorts to unusual means to contrast the detached treatment of a few, highly disparate motifs with one another. While the cool silence of the everyday objects appears somehow fitting, there is nonetheless a strange, highly tense feel to the equally detached depictions of bright-colored, pointed agave, and this is all the more so for the portrayals of slaughtered animals, whose serial coldness we experience as a shocking analogy to the procedure presented.

In these paintings Kitzinger achieves something akin to the squaring of the circle. His works are absolute, autonomous paintings that have no need to omit the subject. They radically forego narrative and metaphorical aspects, such as were still typical of his œuvre in the 1990s (the empty central panel of his triptychs, specific references to death and transience, say in the series "Zwölf Tage im Leben einer Banane") and instead in the dynamism of icy rigidity, in the cool asceticism of their both unpretentious and yet almost religious monumental perfection they address in a new way what has always been the topic of still life, namely Vanitas.

Heidelberg, June 2004

(1) Stephan Berg: "Die Präsenz des Abwesenden," (The Presence of the Absent) in: Thomas Kitzinger, published by Kunstverein Freiburg im Marienbad, catalog, (Kunstverein Freiburg et. al, Freiburg, 1999), p. 7.

(2) Stephan Berg: "Die Leere der Dinge," (The Emptiness of Things), in: Thomas Kitzinger – Malerei, catalog, (Galerie Ulrich Gering, Frankfurt/M., 1995), p. 8.

(3) All quotes by Thomas Kitzinger stem from discussions between the author and the artist in the first half of 2004.

(4) Stephan Berg, see note 1, p. 7.

(5) Stephan Berg, see note 2, p. 9.

(6) From a text by author on the artist Aug. 25, 2003.

(7) Stephan Berg, see note 1, p. 7