Atmospheres of intensive ease (Thoughts on Peter Krauskopf's paintings)

Fernando Castro Flórez

Painting celebrates the enigma of visibility, giving rise to a frenzy that is, in essence, vision itself. Seeing is be-holding, possessing at a distance; and painting extends this fanciful possession to all aspects of a being that somehow must become visible to become painting. Peter Krauskopf is an example of this “voracious vision” that, beyond "visible givens opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae. The eye lives in this texture as a man lives in his house." Regarding this artist's practice, we must look to John Berger's idea that painting is a confirmation of what visibly surrounds us and constantly appears and disappears: “Without the disappearing, there would perhaps be no impulse to paint, for then the visible itself would possess the surety (the permanence) which painting strives to find. More directly than any other art, painting is an affirmation of the existent, of the physical world into which mankind has been thrown." The corporeity of painting has an expressive potential that is hard to compare to anything else. Presumably, the condition of painting is a place to express personhood and individuality, an aspect, as I mentioned before, likely due to its deeply corporeal nature. Ultimately, therefore, painting works like a metaphor, even as an equivalent to sexual activity and is, of course, a space for the projection of tremendous psychic energy.

Some of Peter Krauskopf's fascinating paintings produce a mirror effect trapping the shadow of the onlooker within this space. If his smaller artworks to a certain degree have a preparatory function, where he develops his colour ranges, then his larger works create a subtle interaction with the spectator. The beautiful colours of his paintings hypnotically capture whoever ventures to contemplate them and rhythmically take us from atmospheres inducing visions of fog to the splendour of evening skies, from grey to iridescence and brightness. Even where we believe we see only a single colour there are always reverberations, blends and hints of other tones that introduce a rhythmic nuance or, synaesthetically speaking, a musical nuance.

The intense presence of these works of art produces a drift of emotion and a kind of sense that invokes the memory of dreamlike experiences or an allegoric evocation of nature. Without becoming literal or introducing figurative-picturesque connotations, Peter Krauskopf re-examines that romantic travel narrative which drove the aesthetic of spiritual nomadism. Romantic travel is always about the search for oneself: a long journey inwards, a never-ending flight and escape. It can be a search for identity by delving into pain, an adventure into one's own suffering as much as a trip into dangerous zones. For Capar David Friedrich, the boat was the symbol par excellence of romantic nomadism, the incarnation of the navigatio vitae. Peter Krauskopf's beautiful paintings mark as much a space of passionate colours as an evocation of the “material fluidity” of water that could be interpreted based on Gaston Bachelard's Water and Dreams. Immersion into water means the return to the pre-formal with the double meaning of death and dissolution, but also rebirth, a new cycle, a strengthening of life. As Freud pointed out, dreams usually express birth through water. Water alludes as much to all that is transitory as to what is infinite. Water is transparent deepness, an element that enables the superficial and the profound to communicate. In this sense, one could say, therefore, that water traverses painting.

Materials flow in Peter Krauskopf's paintings. He reduces the dynamic of painting to a process of “smearing” or sweeping pigments. His technique provides analogies to Gerhard Richter's technique, but differs from it in the kind of order he seeks to establish, as well as in his effort to dominate chance and hazard. Some of his paintings transmit a sensation of freshness; the material seems to continue to drip. A few drops go over the edge of the painting in a manifestation of the life force and the fragility of art, of this intensive lapse that challenges us to adopt a contemplative stance. The process during which he applies several layers of colour and aims to create films that work as veils, Krauskopf explains, does not simply have an ornamental function, rather, it is his "way of seeing the world."

Peter Krauskopf asserts himself through painting; his abstract paintings always imply corporeal presence. The painter, as Paul Valéry said, takes his body with him, "immersed in the visible by his body, itself visible, the seer does not appropriate what he sees; he merely approaches it by means of the gaze, he opens onto the world.” “Nature is on the inside", stated Paul Cézanne, forcing us to contemplate the enigma of the body of painting. “Quality, light, colour, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them. Things have an internal equivalent in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence. Why shouldn't these correspondences in turn give rise to some tracing rendered visible again, in which the eyes of others could find an underlying motif to sustain their inspection of the world?”? The incarnation of that, which is visible, from the beasts painted on the walls of Lascaux until today, should not be seen as the representation of something that is somewhere else, but rather as the radiant presence it represents within the concrete space of a painting. I never see the thing itself; I see what the phenomenologist would call the "halos of Being": I see according to it, or with it, rather than that I see it.

More recent paintings by Peter Krauskopf display a double process: of first creating a surface through subtle "smears” of individual colours, then adding lumps of lines that configure a "centre". He masterly articulates these two different sculptural impulses, generating a sensation of sublimity, moving our gaze close in whilst, paradoxically, simultaneously making us take a distance, as if Walter Benjamin's characterisation of the aura as a manifestation of distance no matter how close one is, had been fulfilled. Peter Krauskopf states that his work does not pretend to be anything" else than the act of painting. His creative process fundamentally relies on keeping his mind open and upholding his belief in the possibilities of abstraction to generate zones of visual intensity.

The abstract paintings by Peter Krauskopf, with their elegant colour transitions, remind me of the works of Mark Rothko, who in turn continued the northern romantic tradition and settled the modern i sublime sentiment, which, in the Kantian sense, was related as much to the misery of reason as to the intensified certainty of sensations. As Barnett Newman remarked, the sublime is now, a feeling of delight, when something happened instead of nothing, an event at the limits of the expressible that is testified, because it becomes an opening to escape anxiety and the form in which transcendence materialises. Some recent paintings by Krauskopf have the mysterious tonality of a world of colours that seem to melt into nothingness, even though it should be clear that the intention was neither to dematerialise nor to present a proposition aimed at exhausting or achieving nihilist reduction. To the contrary, his work speaks of material plentifulness and the power of visions. His painting seeks, much like Chinese painting, an empty space with the ability to articulate everything.

These paintings impose their presence and cover us, as if they were atmospheres, they seduce us with their extraordinary subtlety and, through their intense lightness, compel us to contemplate the "layers of the visible”. Valéry was right when he said “what is most deep is the skin”, a phrase completely applicable to Krauskopf's pictoral smears that we caress with our gaze. This artist moves us with his paintings, and paradoxically, makes us stop moving. He mobilises our emotions urging us to halt time to try to become one with the wonder of the world his work focusses on. Once, the writer Vladimir Nabokov was asked whether there was something in life that surprised him. He answered, “the marvel of con sciousness - that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amid the night of non-being”. Through his paintings of enigmatic tranquillity, Peter Krauskopf opens that marvellous window. Faced with the nihilist delight that renounces light, he draws spaces with which we can recover the most intense sense of beauty. He allegorically marks pathways that enable us to enter into that which can save us: poetry.

 [1] [2] [3] Maurice Merleau-Ponty:” Eye and Mind”, The Primacy of Perception

Author：Fernando Castro Flórez
Fernando Castro Flórez is a Spanish philosopher, renowned curator, professor, writer, and art critic. He currently holds the position of Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Autonomous University of Madrid, where he is a lifelong professor. Additionally, he serves as a member of the Advisory Committee of the Sofia Queen National Art Center Museum. Since the 1980s, he has been a regular contributor to cultural supplements in various newspapers, including over a decade as a cultural and art critic for Madrid's oldest media outlet, Abc.es. He has also collaborated with numerous art and culture magazines.

Fernando Castro Flórez has extensive experience as a curator, having been involved in the organization of hundreds of exhibitions. His curatorial work spans events such as the 2000 Hanover World Expo, the Chile Triennial, the Caracas Biennial in Venezuela, and the Curitiba International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Brazil.