| Johannes Rauchenberger From the essay «Stille dem Theaterdonner» (Calm the theatrical thunder) «... H. K.’s painting is neither abstract nor monochrome although at first sight it might seem to belong in those sections of a collection. Subtle nuances created by the over-layering of thin glazes of closely related hues give it its plasticity. Anyone who selects such a style of painting places himself alongside the great revolutionaries who lastingly transformed painting around the mid-twentieth century. Anyone whose work seeks the company of such pictures requires a special quality if it is to visibilize the legendary invisibility of visibility without reducing fine monochromy to an aesthetic of living-room decoration. Not, of course, that H. K.’s pictures have anything in common with the painting of nothing, the negating of negation, or with the bare materiality of paint. Various theories and exhibitions on perception have taught us to see something on a completely blank ground. But constructs of imagination based on a mix of mathematical calculation, op art, and optical illusion are not the same as what H. K. refers to as likenesses in his almost monochrome pictures. (...) Kunitzberger’s decision some nine years ago to live exclusively for and from painting (and with considerable ascesis vis-à-vis the art world) was not simply radicalism, or a late-starter’s conversion, but the logical artistic development of his original profession, namely the theatre. Turning one’s back on theatre and stage-design may be to reject a world of beautiful illusion and hasty illustration. But it is no escape from the vibrant characters who go about their deeds and misdeeds on stage. The dizzying heights and unforgivable depths of the condition humaine are no more nor less than a mirror image of our own "likeness" – to the end that, after lengthy watching and silence, the thunder of the «likenesses» we seek to grasp here can break in on and overmaster us. It is an act that nobody can perform for us. What this still has in common with the theatre is the experience of originality. Even in an age of technological perfection H. K.’s pictures defy reproduction. One must see them bodily in order to bodily experience something of the power that can emanate from a picture. The yield of this painterly perfection? Wafts of colour, painted layer upon layer on reverse primed canvas. One needs a great deal of time to view the pictures and follow the artist in his premise that he is painting nothing but "images", "likenesses". Whether Velázquez’s or Bellini’s portraits of figures of power appear before one’s gaze, or Leonardo’s or Raphael’s Madonnas is not least a matter of grace and what one loves in art history. The pictures can also, perhaps they ought to, kindle in us a sacra conversazione, once time has been shorn of its edge: beyond affirmation, beyond theatrical thunder. As refreshment and silence. ...» Johannes Rauchenberger, Director of the Cultural Centre Minoriten Graz, 2005. From the volume «Hanns Kunitzberger. Die Orte der Bilder. Painting.» |