【 Taipei·DunRen】 'Marvel of consciousness' Peter Krauskopf Solo Show 9.11-10.31

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.

Atmospheres of intensive ease

(Thoughts on Peter Krauskopf's paintings)

Fernando Castro Flórez 費爾南多．卡斯特羅．弗洛雷斯

繪畫頌揚著可見性所帶來的謎團，引起了一場本質上為視覺呈現的狂熱。眼見為憑、遙遙擁有；畫作將這種想像的擁有感延伸至人的各種層面，而這些層面需要以繪畫的方式使擁有變得可見。Peter Krauskopf彼得．克勞斯科夫即是這種「貪婪視覺」的例子；它超越了「視覺揭露了存在的紋理，而其中那離散的感官訊息僅成為標點符號或頓點。眼睛浸潤於這樣的紋理之中，猶如人獨居於自己的房子裡」。關於這位藝術家的實踐，我們必須看看John Berger約翰．伯格的觀點：畫作是對我們週邊不斷出現又消失的可見事物的確認：「沒有消失，也許就沒有繪畫的衝動，為此，那可見性本身將擁有繪畫時力求尋找的保證 (意即持久性)。繪畫比任何一類藝術都來得直接，是對於人類被拋入其中的存在與物理世界的一種肯定。繪畫的實體性具有比其他任何事物都難以比擬的表現力。據推測，繪畫的狀態是一種表達人格與特質的地方；如同我之前提到的，那是一種可能是由於其深刻的有形狀態而形成的層面。因此，最終，繪畫就像是一種隱喻、甚至等同於一種性行為；當然，它也是一種投射巨大精神能量的空間。

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.

這些藝術作品的強烈存在產生了一種情感漂移與一種喚起夢幻體驗記憶的感覺、或對自然的一種寓言式喚起。沒有流於字面意義或帶入美麗的形象意涵，Peter Krauskopf彼得．克勞斯科夫重新審視了推動精神游牧美學的浪漫旅行故事。浪漫旅行總是關於尋找自我：一場對內的長途旅行，永無止境的飛行與逃脫。它可以是一場透過經歷痛苦的自我探索，也可以是一場感受自我痛楚的冒險或者是進入危險地帶的旅行。對Caspar David Friedrich卡斯帕．大衛．弗雷德里希來說，船是浪漫游牧主義的卓越象徵，是航海生涯的化身。而Peter Krauskopf彼得．克勞斯科夫的美麗畫作標記著一個充滿熱情色彩的空間，就像是喚起對水的「物質流動性」那般，可以根據Gaston Bachelard加斯東．巴舍拉的著作《水與夢》來解釋。浸入水中意味著回歸前一形式，具有死亡與解體的雙重意義，但也代表著重生、新的循環、與生命的強化。如同Sigmund Freud西格蒙德．佛洛伊德所指出的，夢境通常以水來象徵出生。水暗示著所有短暫的事物，卻也代表著無限。水是透明的深遂，一種使淺薄與深奧相互溝通的元素。從這個意義上來說，我們可以因此解釋，水穿越了繪畫。

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彼得．克勞斯科夫透過繪畫來彰顯自我，他的抽象畫作總是暗示著有形的存在。正如同Paul Valery保羅．瓦勒里所說的，畫家帶著自己的身體，「沉浸在自身的可見事物之中，本身是可見的，然而，先知者並不侵吞自我所見；他僅僅透過凝視的方式接近它，然後打開了世界」。Paul Cezanne保羅．塞尚說：「自然存在於內部」，迫使我們思考畫體的謎團。「呈現在我們眼前的品質、光線、色彩、深度之所以會存在，是因為它們與我們的身體產生了一種迴響，因為我們的身體歡迎它們。這些事物在我體內產生內在等價；它們在我的身上喚起了存在的肉慾公式。為何這些關聯不應該反過來引起一些再次變得可見的踪跡，使其他人的眼睛可以從中找到一個潛在的中心思想來維持他們對世界的審視？」可見性的化身，從拉斯科洞窟壁畫上的野獸直至今日，不應被視為其他地方某物的代表，而是作為它在繪畫的具體空間中所顯現出光芒四射的存在。我從來沒有見過事物的本身；我只看到現象學家所說的「存在的光環」：我根據它或隨著它一起看見，而並非實際看到它。

Peter Krauskopf彼得．克勞斯科夫更近期的畫作顯示了一種雙重過程：首先以各種顏色微妙「塗抹」的方式建立表層，然後添加能夠配置成為「中心」的線條團塊。他高超且清楚地表達這兩種不同的雕塑性脈衝，產生一種崇高莊嚴的氣質，將我們的視線移近的同時，矛盾的是，又將我們的距離拉開。如同Walter Benjamin瓦特．班雅明將靈光（Aura）描述為無論距離多近，都能表現出距離特徵的形式已經實現。Peter Krauskopf彼得．克勞斯科夫表示他的作品除了繪畫行為本身以外，並未假裝成「任何東西」。他的創作過程本質上依賴於保持他的心胸開放並堅持他對於抽象產生視覺強度區域的可能性之信念。

Peter Krauskopf彼得．克勞斯科夫的抽象畫以及上面優雅的色彩過渡，讓我想起Mark Rothko馬克．羅斯科的作品，他延續了北方浪漫傳統並確立了現代的絕美情感；這在康德主義的層面上，與理性的痛苦以及感知的強化確定性有相同的關聯。正如Barnett Newman巴內特．紐曼所強調的，這樣的絕美意境現在是一種愉悅之感，當無事之下發生了某事時，該情況便被證實為一件處於可表達極限的事件，因為這樣的事件便成為焦慮散逸的開口，而這樣的形式超越了物質形態。Peter Krauskopf彼得．克勞斯科夫最近的一些畫作帶有色彩世界的神秘調性，看似融化成虛無，即使我們應該清楚其意圖既非去物質化、也不是提出一個旨在耗盡或達成虛無歸零的主張。相反的，他的作品描述了物質的豐富與視覺的力量。他的繪畫，如同中國畫作那般，尋求著一個能夠表達一切的空白空間。

這些畫作強化了它們的存在並覆蓋了我們，如同大氣那般，以它們非凡的微妙誘惑我們，透過強烈的輕盈，迫使我們思考「可見性的層次」。Valéry瓦勒里說得對，他說「最深層的是皮膚」；這句話完全適用於Peter Krauskopf彼得．克勞斯科夫那讓我們我們用目光愛撫的繪畫塗抹。這位藝術家用畫作感動了我們，矛盾的是，也讓我們停止感動。他騷動我們的情感、敦促我們停止時間並試著與他作品中所關注的世界奇蹟融為一體。有一次，作家Vladimir Nabokov弗拉基米爾．納博科夫被問到生活中是否有什麼使他感到驚訝。他回答「意識的驚奇—在了無生氣之夜，有扇窗突然打開在陽光普照的風景上」。Peter Krauskopf彼得．克勞斯科夫透過他神秘寧靜的畫作，打開了那扇驚奇之窗。面對棄絕光明的虛無喜悅，他繪製了一個讓我們可以找回最強烈美感的空間。他寓言式地標記了使我們能夠進入其中並產生救贖的路徑：詩意。

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.