Between Facts and Fictions.
Notes on recent pictures by Karin Kneffel
In the fall of 2009 Karin Kneffel’s project Haus am Stadtrand – House on the Edge of Town opened in the Museum Haus Esters. It was an unusually inspiring exhibition, a thematically coherent cycle of works produced in response to an invitation by Martin Hentschel, the director of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld. On display were fourteen paintings of various formats that were impressive not only for their painterly quality, but also for their relation to the venue itself. For it was immediately apparent that they featured the architecture of the museum, originally conceived as a residence. The structure of the interior spaces, the window shapes, and various other details revealed viewers to be standing in the very setting pictured in the paintings. In these present-day works, however, historical reminiscences were folded in with observations of phenomena relating to other contexts, accordingly alienating. Also, many of the visual axes crossed each other. Mirror images, reflected lights, and partial blurrings were disorienting. Viewers found themselves confronted with overlapping and interpenetrating perspectives. What one was looking at, soon lost all its presumed clarity, and, little by little, revealed inconsistencies that seemed to multiply the longer one tried to comprehend it.
Even this summary sketch suggests something of the painter’s aesthetic strategies, recognized and discussed previously. One notable analysis, in a conceptually stringent and pointed essay by Annelie Pohlen from 2006, in which she describes the effect of Kneffel’s pictures as a blend of seduction and distancing. “All reality is mirrored reflection in painting and can only be attributed to the refinded calculation of an abstract composition. A precision commensurate to the object at handmay succeed in temporarily obscuring the unreality, only ultimately grant the imaginary the disquieting presence that draws us in and confuses us.” In fact, a great deal of what one sees in the artist’s so impressive depictions appears to be imaginary. This is equally true of the thematically related works she has produced since that exhibition in 2009–10. In these as well, the objects represented are altogether recognizable, yet appear more or less blurred. It is striking that some paintings include a foreground picture plane dominated by rounded shapes reminiscent of drops of water. For example, one interior (p. 10, Part 01) provides a glimpse of a living room. Heavy upholstered furniture, oriental carpets, a large blue curtain, and other details identify it as an upper-class home from the past, and the open book with spectacles, the large bookcase, the pictures, and the sculpture by Wilhelm Lehmbruck suggest the culture and refinement of the absent occupants. The composition is related to another work painted in 2009. There, in the left-hand section of the triptych, the same arrangement of tulips reappears, and here, as there, the sharply outlined drops with their reflections dominate the foreground picture plane. Also carried over are the round spotlights that glide across the wall and curtain. Kneffel works with these same visual elements in another picture (p. 09, Part 01) that in turn combines in a square format the motifs of the other two panels of the triptych.Even these few references make it clear that Kneffel tends to focus on specific combinations of motifs, employing them in different works in a similar or slightly altered form. Though the overall theme is retained, the visual quality is frequently changed, so each painting has a different effect. This happens, for example, when the blobs and streaks of water are eliminated or reduced to a minimum (p. 15 Part 01); or a different vantage point is selected (pp. 16–17, Part 01). Often certain details are eliminated, the colors appear to be lighter, or the contrasts between light and dark are heightened. Such transformations make the depictions as a whole seem less representational and more abstract_at least less legible. For the refraction of the foreground picture plane and the attendant blurring and dematerialization of the objects farther back, Kneffel repeatedly employs streaks of condensation (p. 19, Part 01) or bizarre drops of water (pp. 12–13, 16–17, 20–21, Part 01). When the contours of these elements are clearly marked, their transparency reduced, and a golden shimmer generated, they look like honey-colored amber (pp. 09–10, Part 01). There are also depictions that are more suggestive of a sphere under water or the outside of an aquarium (pp. 128–129, Part 01).
In recent years misted glass functions as a kind of filter. This filmy screen appears in front of the picture world, combines with it, both discloses and alienates it. So the viewer is left with no doubt about what s/he is seeing; s/he is shown how someone has written or drawn something on the steamy pane with a finger, an allusion to a common experience. In winter, when the difference in temperature between inside and out is very great and there is sufficient humidity, windows fog up and restrict one’s view outside or obscure it altogether. And it is not only children who are automatically tempted to scrawl something on them with their fingers before wiping off much of the pane so as to be able to see out. One can’t help but wonder who invented the smileys.
Generally in these depictions transparency and multilayeredness are combined with matter-of-fact observation and seeming insouciance. Fleeting, gestural elements assigned to a foreground plane alternate with soft, somewhat dematerialized objects belonging to a different layer. Traces of activity are registered, creating a dreamlike situation. One’s consciousness registers various temporal layers and planes of depth. There is no spatial effect, for the objects depicted scarcely have volume and do not obey any rules of perspective. As a result, everything in these pictures seems immaterial, intangible, and removed from reality.
Now and again interiors of the Haus Esters are revisited, as in the earlier works from the project House on the Edge of Town (p. 09, Part 01). These are joined by interior views of Haus Lange (p. 10, Part 01). They are all based on photographs from the period around 1930. Both structures were designed by Mies van der Rohe. These incunabula of modern architecture were not only comfortable residences, they were also designed in such a way that works of art could be displayed in them to great effect, as is attested to by their present-day function as museums. Hermann Lange (1874–1942), the director of the United Silk-Weaving Mills, for example, owned more than 300 works of modern art, including pictures by Braque, Picasso, Léger, Macke, Marc, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff, Dix, Beckmann, Chagall, Miró, and others, as well as sculptures by Lehmbruck, Maillol and Sintenis. Photographs in which some of these works can be identified obviously served as patterns for a number of Kneffel’s paintings, though, needless to say, this historical material was in each case subjected to a radical transformation. Her works are virtual appropriations, that is to say pictorial meditations on aspects of the past that have been for the most part lost (the collections) or are still present (the houses). To some extent they are sublimated evocations of what has disappeared but that still adheres to what survives of the original architecture. One is therefore confronted with something like souvenir pictures filled with cloudiness, lacunae and incoherencies that manifest themselves as aesthetic phenomena.
#02
The Krefeld project continued to occupy Kneffel and in the spring of 2014 she produced yet another large, horizontal-format painting (pp. 140–141, Part 01) that pictures the interior of Haus Lange (erected from plans by Mies between 1928 and 1930). The entrance hall and various works of art can be identified. Above a low bookcase on the right is August Macke’s Grand Promenade, People in the Park, from 1914, then on a pedestal next to it is Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s Torso of a Young Woman, from 1911. In the side room is the Recumbent Female Nude, -also by Lehmbruck. On the wood-paneled wall farther to the left hangs Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Potsdamer Platz, painted in 1914 and presumably added to the collection of Hermann Lange. Shortly afterward, the large painting was lent to the National Gallery in Berlin, and for a time it was -displayed in the Kronprinzenpalais, but during the Nazis’ campaign against modernism it was removed in the late summer of 1932 and sometime later returned to the lender.
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The open interior, with the spaces flowing into each other, and to which an elegant parquet floor and a number of large Persian carpets lend a homey atmosphere, presents only a very small portion of Hermann Lange’s important art collection. But translating a photographic document into a wall-filling painting was not Kneffel’s primary aim. A few peculiarities undermine one’s assumption that this is a historical illustration of the sort of cultivated ambience one might expect from a well-to-do industrialist with a penchant for modernism toward the end of the Weimar Republic. Though it is not in the historical photo, at the left edge of the painting one sees what is obviously Lehmbruck’s Torso of a Girl Turning Around, from 1914. The angled view of the back of the sculpture and its position seem strange, suggesting that the work could not have been displayed this way.
Other motifs make it clear that historical accuracy was not Kneffel’s intention. Among these are a young woman kneeling on the floor with her buckets and mop rags in the foreground, who has suddenly interrupted her work, and an older woman who has just set down her pail of water. Both are looking at a man who has slipped on the wet floor and fallen flat on his back. Whereas the artworks picture coquettes and their admirers in the center of Berlin (Kirchner), a family outing in a park (Macke) as well as standing and recumbent female nudes (Lehmbruck), the superimposed picture focuses on housework and a mishap wholly unmotivated in this context; one wonders what might have caused the balding man to flee from the villa and stumble. But that is not all. In the center of the picture is a third plane initially overlooked. To the right and left of center are large handprints that give the impression of viewing the interior scene through a fogged pane of glass with multiple light reflections. The invisible or absent witness, whose position one assumes as viewer, stands across from the sculpture on its pedestal. To be sure, Kneffel has not simulated a view of the interior through a window, but in her staging and with the changing perspectives she makes the incongruency of the various spheres perfectly apparent. The scale of the artworks does not match that of the staffage; the Haus Lange entrance hall appears to be huge, assuming virtual museum dimensions.
The painting is accordingly a synthesis of motifs drawn from different sources. For example, the woman with the buckets at the right edge can be seen again in another Kneffel picture that was based on a photograph of the set for Hitchcock’s crime film The Torn Curtain (pp. 58–59, Part 01). The 1966 film served as the inspiration for a number of compositions in which cleaning women are busily damp-mopping an already shiny floor_a clear indication that the film’s hero, the spy Michael Armstrong, played by Paul Newman, has gotten himself into a risky situation on his mission into East Germany, one in which he could slip, fall, and break his neck. In these works as well, Kneffel employs alienating effects, fictional foreground panes on which large drops of water or light reflections and handprints are visible. The film was intended to create an illusion. The production still documents how such fictions are produced. Illusion is suggested in that the glass with its trickles of water and reflective effects not only represents a distancing element, but also contradicts the reality of the photo, or turns the event it depicts into a phantasmagoria. The drops of water are rendered sharply and close up. They enlarge and distort. The setting and figures seem distanced and blurred. The view into Haus Lange and the reproduction of a set from Hitchcock’s late film, in which the competing ideologies of the Cold War are presented in a banal and clichéd manner, create the impression of historical accuracy. Yet the combination of the factual with unrelated elements undermines any plausibility and turns everything into fiction.
The suspicion that reality and fantasy are blended is reinforced when the scope of the picture is reduced and the motivic cohesion dissolved, as in another picture that belongs in this context. The scene, rendered in watery and blue tones (pp. 54–55, Part 01), is presented in a bird’s-eye view. On the left, next to a few pieces of upholstered furniture, two women can be seen kneeling on the floor and scrubbing it, while at the top edge of the picture one can only make out hands with brushes or a dark skirt or trousered legs pacing. The gleam of the floor, the highlights, and the modulation of pastel tones alternating with white and light gray contrast with the clearly outlined drips and spots of water that appear to be in front of the actual picture plane. It is impossible to make out whether the glass is meant to be thought of as standing vertically or lying horizontally. The traces of water dripping from top to bottom suggest a vertical position, but the bird’s-eye perspective and the immobility of the drops suggest a horizontal one. The whole is a high-level painterly exercise that causes the emptied center to triumph over all the action at the margins.
#03
Worth noting in this context is another painting that refers not so much to Mies and the original occupants of his Krefeld houses as to the Krefeld Project produced by the -American painter Eric Fischl in 2002. Fischl also focused on Haus Esters, but furnished it with contemporary modernist furnishings, engaged two actors, and had them pretend to be a couple for several days. From the many photographs Fischl took of this performance he developed the compositions for his paintings on computer. Kneffel refers to one of these Fischl works (p. 19, Part 01): in her painting, through a pane of glass with traces of condensation, we watch two young girls as they turn to Fischl’s painting. They are studying it in the former Esters family dining room. In this picture within a picture we see the husband, with his shirt open, drinking a glass of water, and to the right his wife, also half-undressed. On the wall behind them hang works by Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, and Bruce Nauman. Kneffel completes her depiction with a view through to the terrace on the right. There someone is wielding a broom, apparently sweeping up leaves. It is a museum employee, however the motif comes from other contexts.
Once again various picture planes and motivic spheres overlap and interpenetrate each other. What is taking place telescopes events from a span of roughly eighty years. It is not only an aesthetic construct, but also a reflection on the history of architecture (Mies) and painting (Fischl), on social behavior (the couple in Fischl, the viewers in Kneffel), on work (the sweeping), and on leisure time (the visit to the exhibition). The institutional setting is also ultimately reflected. For what was formerly a residence now serves as a museum with its own personnel. In addition, there are other contrasts: mirror images and reflections, sharpness and blurring, transparency and opacity, writing and signs without specific meaning, picture within picture within picture (Richter’s painting reproduced by Fischl, whose painting is then quoted by Kneffel). In this network of references Bruce Nauman’s 1967 neon piece that Fischl_after him, Kneffel_reproduces, serves as an ironic commentary: “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.” Kneffel’s multilayered painting is not about revealing mystic truths, but rather blending past and present. It is about the interweaving of appropriation and alienation, approach and avoidance, spontaneity and reflection_and all this not as a theoretical construct but as subtle painterly process. Is a picture with such a program trying to do too much? And does this great complexity create confusion? Can the painting deliver what it promises in motif and suggests in content? These are abstract questions that dissipate in the presence of the work. Kneffel manages to mesh the different levels so convincingly that the effect of the picture is homogeneous, aided by the blue-toned palette that unifies all the disparate elements. This confident synthesis imparts brilliance and depth to the picture.
#04
For all the strangeness about the recognition of reworked documents and art works or aspects of reality in these paintings, what is only vaguely recalled, unfully experienced, and subconsciously intuited coalesces into a concise visual image. Words that are meant to capture this, however, seem to be forever inadequate in the face of what one sees, to recall Michel Foucault. “Neither language nor painting can be reduced to the other’s terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say. And it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying.” Foucault saw that one way to resolve this aporia was to keep linguistic and visual references as open as possible, to avoid introducing concepts and proper nouns. “It is perhaps through the medium of this grey, anonymous language, always overmeticulous and repetitive because too broad, that the painting may, little by little, release its illuminations.” The extent to which one can release the “illuminations” of Kneffel’s painting (and ultimately the meanings her works communicate) by describing it in the greatest possible detail remains an open question. Foucault’s exegetical method so scrupulously exemplified on the basis of a painting from the seventeenth century_to which I will return later_could also be applied to Kneffel’s works, however this is not the place to do so with the required precision and thoroughness. Of necessity, our descriptions remain only cursory, and can indicate only approximately what the works are about, that is to say what techniques are applied and what motivations are manifested in them. Even so, descriptions of their subject matter and the way it is handled can possibly ensure “that our imagination, directed at artworks, is carried away by their imaginative projections.”
In 2010 Karin Kneffel created a large, almost square painting (p. 49, Part 01) that provides insight into a way of working that in its complexity goes beyond what has been previously observed. In the foreground the composition is dominated by a group of people who either turn their backs to the viewer or face to the left. They are joined in the mid-ground by other figures in period costume, while the background is filled with rectangular elements readily identifiable as framed paintings. Two glaring spotlights appear to fit in this ensemble as uneasily as the smiley formed by curving, semi-transparent lines and two dark spots. Whereas the glowing shapes appear to be in no particular location, it is clear that the leering specter with outstretched arms exists on a plane this side of the assembled figures. Even these few suggestions make it apparent that the picture, dominated by silvery and richly nuanced gray tones, is not as homogeneous as it first appears to be. The zones stacked in space represent not only different times, but also different social relationships and contradictory cultural habits.
The subject is revealed once one considers the middle ground more carefully, where one of the most famous works in art history is reproduced, the epochal masterpiece by Velázquez, Las Meninas from 1656. The painter can be seen to the right as he steps out from behind a huge painting on which he is working to cast an inquiring glance at his subjects. The main figure in the baroque composition is the Infanta Margarita. In the center of Kneffel’s picture one sees only her brightly illuminated forehead framed by blond hair and a red bow. To her left and right, only the profile or head and torso of the two ladies-in-waiting can be seen. On the left edge, in golden light, the Infanta’s attendant is conversing with a watchman of the guard, and in front of her is the unmistakable, distorted face of the dwarf Bárbola, while the director of the royal tapestry works observes the scene from a distance in the brightly illuminated doorway. What Velázquez is painting and what the Infanta and her court ladies are looking at, is possibly indicated in the dark-framed mirror on the right, next to the door. It has been assumed that this is the royal couple being portrayed by the painter. The visitors gathered in front of Las Meninas in the Prado are listening to the narrative of the guide on the far left, but do not themselves look at the painting.
Kneffel’s composition can be thought of not only as an homage to Velázquez, but also as a recourse to some challenging photographs based on this everyday situation. Making Time was the title of an exhibition and a publication presenting a selection of pictures taken by Thomas Struth in the Prado in 2005. With them he continued his series of museum photographs, perhaps the best-known in his œuvre. The number of large-format pictures of viewers in front of Las Meninas suggests the special importance Struth has accorded this motif. Kneffel’s homage is thus twofold; her painting honors a painting by one of the greatest of the old masters and a masterly photograph by one of her contemporaries. But her appreciation is not directly expressed; rather it is ambiguous and fragmented, and raises a number of questions. When viewing her picture, it is important to note that the Baroque painting is reversed, as though seen in a mirror. One therefore has to imagine the smiley on the surface of the reflecting glass; the glaring lights in the painting may belong there too. The golden circle obviously dissolves at the edges in the mirror, when the reflecting rays strike the painting and become diffuse. Kneffel’s composition can be understood as a simulated, experimental arrangement, one that is not intended to be exact but that aims at both an alienating effect and the twofold homage, in which, to be sure, little skepticism and distance appear to mix.How are we to understand it? In Las Meninas the seventeenth-century painter, who is looking out of the painting, is, after all, considering the space in which we find ourselves as viewers. According to Foucault, who studied the painting, a virtual line runs through the painting from the painter’s eyes and arrives, this side of its surface, at the spot from which we see the painter, who is observing us. Thus a simple topos is dealt with based on reciprocity.Obviously it is only a fiction that the painted gaze of the artist meets ours as viewers. The subject on which his attention is focused was always present. The mirror in the background of the baroque painting reveals that this was presumably the royal couple posing for their portrait. Although impossible to see, the painter’s concentrated attention is directed not at us, but at Philipp IV and Maria Anna of Austria. In Kneffel’s painting, then, he is looking not at the viewer before his work, but into a mirror. In it he would see not only himself, the atelier, and his own work, but also the group of onlookers gathered in front of his masterpiece.
It is now known that a vertical mirror does not reverse. It reflects right and left precisely where right and left are. It presents an absolute duplicate of what is before it. It is the viewer, who for identification imagines himself as the figure in the mirror, and who then, as he studies himself, suddenly discovers that he is wearing his watch on his right wrist, where he would only wear it were he the one who finds himself in the mirror.
Kneffel’s painting does not focus on the discrepancy between perception and interpretation; that is to say that she does not simulate what the Baroque artist might have perceived were the situation real. Instead, she paints the mirror image of a photograph that was doubtless taken not too long ago, as can be seen from the style of those who have gathered in front of Velázquez’s painting but fail to honor it_at least in the moment captured_with as much as a glance. So that there can be no doubt about the unreal nature of the depiction: an impudent physiognomy is superimposed on the whole, a gigantic emoticon whose surreal effect is further accentuated by the unmotivated planes of light that glance through the composition.
Kneffel’s programmatic picture can be understood as a graphic treatise on the relationship between painting and photography; in addition, past and present are brought into a distinct relationship. High art is confronted with a graffito. And one observes how a masterpiece can attract a mass public yet be scarcely noticed. Thus Kneffel broaches the problem of art appreciation. Significantly, the public finds itself between a masterpiece of Spanish painting and a smiley_that is between high and low. Seen in this light, her painting can be thought of as documentation, an illustration of the state of visual culture in our time. It is a document that converts everything consecutive into simultaneity, oscillating between fact and fiction.
What we have before us is a visual statement that explains what motivates Kneffel in her painting: a theoretical approach, an ability to register it in aesthetic terms, and a painterly competence convincingly complement each other, and reveal the seriousness of her engagement. Subjective states are as remote from this œuvre as a “laissez-faire” attitude. Most obviously, the paintings refer to the more or less familiar reality of an important work of art and its public.
On closer examination, the subjects only partially relate to each other, revealing themselves to be in part illusionary, refusing to be integrated into an evident whole. This is because of the ambivalent juxtaposition of many things whose appearances often seem inconsistent; for example the location of the motifs in space and their place in time is deliberately left unclear. Martin Hentschel aptly speaks of an “osmosis between spaces and places.” Kneffel’s pictures are absolutely contemporary, but frequently refer to facts or events from the past. The graphic character of her works at first disguises, thanks to the fascinating blend of the ordinary and the perplexing, the fact that in these compositions so perfect in terms of craftsmanship something profoundly disturbing, puzzling, and at times even unsettling is embodied. What is always available in diffuse form, the pre- and subconscious, congeals into a picture, and thus becomes virtually “tangible” and comprehensible. Or_to put it another way_unregistered experience is illuminated by being distilled into an experience of a second order_that is to say the experience can be experienced. The picture described here in considerable detail can be seen as a key work, one that points back to Kneffel’s earlier works and anticipates what she has produced since. Recent works are often not so multilayered, but represent a stance that links clarity to reflection and thematic concentration to coloristic sensitivity.
#05
The graphic nature of all the paintings from recent years is characterized by refraction. In her subtle blending of different points of view, Kneffel alludes to Leon Battista Alberti’s definition of a painting as a view through a rectangular window, with a landscape or some other subject depicted in precise perspective on the surface bordered by the frame. One cannot help but ask whether the artist, with her so-distinct emphasis on the flatness of her compositions, has not reverted to this concept that defined European painting for centuries. Has she, even though modernism preached a different definition of the picture? Let us think back. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for Maurice Denis a picture was nothing more than a flat surface covered with selected colors in a given arrangement. What a painting expressed was determined by how it was made and its style, not the subject represented. One has to see this as an argument for the autonomy of the means of representation as manifested, beginning in the second decade of the twentieth century, in expressionistic, abstract, or monochrome paintings. Kneffel is not primarily interested in the intrinsic value of colors, forms, and techniques. Her attention is definitely focused on her motifs and how they relate to each other. And she practices a painting technique that leaves no trace of her handiwork on a smooth and flawless surface; her brush strokes are invisible. Thus the autonomy of pictorial means is rejected in her work. And she also ignores Alberti. Kneffel does not work with a single surface, but with various transparent, layered planes, blending multiple projections.Clearly her method was inspired by a photographic technique.
Kneffel’s painting makes use of photographs, some documentary, some taken herself. By blending different planes she creates an intriguing illusion that is both beautiful and unfathomable, unspectacular and menacing, which fuses contraries. Such an appraisal would seem sufficient were it not for the question of what is intended in this multilayered amalgam, what the ultimate inspiration is behind her paintings. Their subjects are by no means arbitrary. Is their combination of different perspectives and heterogeneous classes of objects mainly meant to suggest that evidence can be deceptive, that our perception of reality as influenced by photographs is based on illusions? Is she perhaps determined to show that the obvious, if not incomprehensible, is at the very least complex? All this is self-evident, and would hardly justify such labored compositional techniques. Perhaps it is not only about the inherent messages coupled with motifs and the modes of their presentation, but, above all, about the realization of an aesthetic experience that only the medium of painting can provide in such a way.
That this is the case seems clear enough if one calls to mind what a photograph can achieve that employs mirror effects in an artistic manner and blends several levels of perception. A comparison with the work of Sabine Hornig, a well-known contemporary photographer, can be instructive. The central motif in her large-format, mostly analog works is often a large display window through which one can get a glimpse inside. But one also sees what is reflected in the glass. Because of the resulting kaleidoscopic effect, one can no longer determine what is a simple image and what is a catoptric effect. Hornig’s confusingly multilayered photos can thus be understood as “palimpsests of points of view.” Different temporal layers alternate in them, producing a virtual space-time continuum. The method has a long tradition in the history of photography, one that extends from Eugène Atget to Dan Graham, Lee Friedlander, and others. Whereas Hornig occasionally takes up the compositional principles of painting, consciously or unconsciously, and accordingly produces photographs reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting, Kneffel’s references are much more broadly applied. Banal snapshots play just as great a role in her work as stills from famous films; but above all_and this is what gives her work its special importance her paintings are filled repeatedly with multilayered reminiscences from history and culture.
Similar as the origins of Hornig’s and Kneffel’s pictures may appear at first glance, Kneffel’s medium produces a completely different aesthetic presence and immediacy, and allows for an entirely different degree of complexity. In this context one recalls a remark by Gerhard Richter, with whom she studied. “The photograph”, Richter claimed,“has virtually no reality, is virtually only apicture. And painting always has reality, onecan touch the pigment, it has presence; but it always produces a picture regardless whether good or bad.”
Richter’s comment seems somewhat cryptic at first, but the juxtaposition of works by Kneffel and Hornig sketched here serves to clarify what he meant. There is always something cool, almost aseptic about photographs mounted behind glass, whereas the sheer materiality of a paintedcanvas even if the application of pigment is uniform and flawless, as Kneffel’s is gives it a haptic quality. Kneffel’s compositions of the last few years present fragments of a kind of panorama symptomatic of our time, a pictorial reflection on the present situation. In this electronic age, in which everything is fluid and accessible, Kneffel has mobilized an historical medium in opposition to the seeming dematerialization of the world of objects and the formidable centrifugal forces of the time. This is evident in Kneffel’s complex paintings. They are not simply picture puzzles that tempt the viewer to set out in search of references. Their meaning results from her ability to draw together and combine heterogeneous elements. Intuition plays a part in her creative process, and although conceptual considerations are important, chance is largely excluded.
Kneffel’s Las Meninas painting and other of her latest works exploit the relationship between photography and painting, a longstanding subject of heated discussion, in an uncommonly pointed way. The longer one considers these canvases from a distance, the more one feels s/he is looking at a photographic enlargement of a painted image. But when one finally approaches them that impression fades, and one begins to recognize that here painting is imitating photography, to be sure, and competing with it, but that the pattern photograph was itself designed for translation into painting. Their interdependency is such that it is impossible to distinguish visually what has been kept separate in descriptions. One’s experience sets the pane of glass apart from the interior. But that such a separation is not necessarily a given is demonstrated by Kneffel’s painting, which confronts the attentive viewer with an abundance of aporias and ambivalences. What the painter has pictured cannot be divided into its separate elements. What appears in the artwork is ultimately inaccessible to aesthetic experience. In this respect the truth of the work of art, which is revealed in the flash of aesthetic experience, is both objectively, and in the given instance, incomprehensible. In her works Kneffel reflects this inconclusiveness of aesthetic experience, and this is apparent in the heterogeneity of her subjects and the manner in which they are presented.
#06
Turning to another example (pp. 116–117, Part 01), also a large format, this composition consists wholly of delicate blue tones, developed in two layers. One is looking at an angle through a pane of glass fogged with moisture into a large, square interior defined by two walls, a part of the paneled ceiling, and floor. The room is furnished with dark-wood, four-person tables, banquettes, and a collection of chairs based on one (the Brno Chair) designed by Mies in 1929. These are lined up along the walls. Only in the center of the room is there a small table for two. As so often in Kneffel’s work, someone has scrawled on the steamy pane of glass, in this case the word “hope.”
The fogged pane, with its writing and blobs or streaks of water, and the interior are perceptible as two planes, but blend into a perplexing pictorial unity. That the two different spheres are also related in terms of content becomes evident when one registers that on the back wall of the room hang three large paintings by Robert Indiana, each of them presenting in capital letters the word HOPE.Thus an homage is paid to a renowned American Pop artist, but at the same time the portentous images are reduced to pointless decoartion, temporarily installed in the Four Seasons restaurant at the Seagram Building in New York.
Designed by Mies and completed in 1958, the steel-skeleton Park Avenue structure with a non-bearing curtain facade is considered iconic. The furnishing of the restaurant that to this day plays a prominent role in the the sophisticated social life of the metropolis, was mainly the work of Philip Johnson. As the painting shows, Johnson deliberately resorted to Mies’s own furniture designs. But Kneffel’s painting is by no means celebratory; one feels as if looking at a utilitarian, anonymous office environment, as suggested for example, by the plate with a sandwich and bit of lettuce, the napkin, and the carafe of water on a bare table in the foreground. Presumably it is early morning. The staff of the elegant restaurant has not yet arrived at work to set the tables. Another detail suggests as much. In the background, not far from the bleak still life, someone has stretched out on a banquette. The trousers and shoes suggest that it is a man. The details do not not suggest a crime scene, but rather an everyday one. A man is resting, and will presumably soon get up. What does the word “hope” mean against such a background? Nothing, actually, for here “hope” functions as an empty symbol divorced from its semantic meaning, scarcely more than a configuration of letters and colors. Syntactical or associative connections are lacking. Indiana’s works in the Four Seasons, which are not as well known as his other world-famous LOVE paintings seem bland and decorative. The handwritten version on the pane of glass is about to evaporate, another sign of literally diminishing hope.
It is this ambivalence between presence and indistinctness that characterizes the look of the painting throughout. To be sure, the Indiana pictures necessarily recall something else. Mark Rothko accepted a commission to create paintings for the restaurant for its opening in 1958, but then capitulated, feeling that his sublime works designed for quiet contemplation would be wholly out of place in such social surroundings. Artists of the subsequent generation such as James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, Richard Anuszkiewicz, and Robert Indiana had fewer scruples, as they felt themselves to be in good company, for between the Grill and the Pool Room was the curtain for Le Tricorne, created in 1919 after a design by Picasso and with his collaboration for the Ballets Russes.
Without going further into the history and furnishing of the Four Seasons, it must be said that the restaurant was, and still is, a synonym for glamour, social intercourse, gastronomy, and contemporary art. But Kneffel’s picture does not indicate any of this. Instead, she pictures this legendary New York institution at a moment in the day when it is never seen by its well-heeled clientele. The painting evokes only indistinct presentiments and vage recollections. It is wholly self-contained, and its message is impossible to formulate in simple terms. To attempt to explain what one sees necessarily enters onto uncertain terrain. With its combination of painting as painting, historical reminiscence, and present-day situation, transparency, and opacity, the painting ultimately proves to be a trap. One has the impression of peeking into the space of an elegant restaurant at an inopportune time, but perhaps something entirely different is subliminally suggested. Little by little Antonioni’s Blow-Up effect sets in, and just as then_1966_one has the sense of looking not at a peaceful setting but a crime scene.
A second picture painted in 2013 takes up this same theme again (p. 121, Part 01). The point of view is different, and the repertoire of motifs has been reduced, so that the work’s structure is much simpler. The vertical center axis between the two paintings on the back wall and the horizontal lines coinciding with their lower edges lend stability to the composition. Only the angled placement of the table for two in the foreground provides a latent disorder. Somewhat farther back, beneath the almost fully reproduced HOPE paintings, is the resting man, presumably a waiter, who has not yet touched his snack on a side table to the right. His pink necktie is folded across his eyes, against the shimmering play of light and shadow, which would appear to be caused by a tree in sunlight_but where could one be, given the urban location? There is obviously no plausible explanation for the visual phenomenon. The painter once again presents the viewer with a fiction, so that one has to ask oneself whether in this case a screen has been virtually superimposed on the interior, on which shapes are seen that have nothing to do with the actual ambience of the restaurant.
Kneffel returned to the same theme yet again in 2013. Quasi-abstract configurations of actual objects interpenetrate and overlap each other in one case (pp. 124–125, Part 01) to such a degree that it is no longer possible to separate the various planes. Again and again it is possible to make out individual objects in the same Four Seasons setting. Virtually the same situation is captured as in a previous painting (pp. 122–123, Part 01), only from a greater distance and an elevated viewpoint. But a spatial structure is now sensed rather than actually visible. For example, in the lower left there is an elegant bouquet of tulips, dark seating at the edges of a light blue carpet, a few small round tables in the center; also a man staring straight ahead, as if tracking a remote-controlled toy across the floor. In the background there a brightly dressed party of people with other guests seated on a dais whose parapet is made up of dark-brown wooden panels like those covering the back wall. On the right, finally, there is a view through a large window of an adjacent office building. There is a bright spot to the right of the center. Here are railings, parapets, the fluted surround of a descending staircase, and a few inexplicable light reflections. What seems arbitrary is in fact a well-considered staging. This area, which seems somehow chaotic and unsettling with its heterogeneous details, is surrounded by representational sections that can be more or less clearly identified. The colors are also subtly applied. For example, the cool blue tones in the lower left area correspond to the diluted gray-blue of the glass panes in the upper right. This diagonal is crossed by another whose radiant golden nuances below center right draw the viewer’s gaze across semi-transparent islands to the upper left, where a blank area lends an auratic quality to a man in a dark suit. Placed in front of all this are, once again, droplets of condensation, which enrich the more homogenous areas of the painting and represent additional confusion. The strongest color accent is in the lower left corner, where the green and the red of the flowers form a bright prelude, drawing attention to the man in the center and the larger party around the table in the background.
While the complex ensemble of different shapes and colors fails to generate a coherent sense of space, the immediate radiance it produces stimulates various interpretations. What is first perceived as a disturbed order, proves to be the result of ingenious disposition. Above all, by manipulating the medium Kneffel is able to alienate and transcend the depicted reality by means of reflections, projections, and transparencies. In this respect her works are artistic exercises, proof of her her technical competence and bravura.
As to the meaning of these pictures, it would seem that there is a sense of disillusionment lurking in the background. Mies’s Seagram Building and the Four Seasons restaurant as originally furnished by Johnson embodied an optimistic America. But what is left of that? It’s probably that Kneffel inspected the site one morning and took photographs as the basis for her work. That someone was napping in the restaurant should not be over-interpreted; there could have been various reasons why the dishes in the lounge were untouched. And the few figures lost in this ambience do not reveal much. Adding up all these details, one gets the impression that the force of the painting stands in striking contrast to a reality in which there is an atmosphere of emptiness. For all the opulence of the colors, the solitary staff seem isolated, turned in on themselves, in the manner of Edward Hopper.
In sum, this series of pictures is not a celebration of place, institution or society, but an aesthetic reflection that remains ultimately ambivalent. Here, fascination and scepticism, attraction and withdrawal, enthusiasm and disillusionment are found in equal measure. That there is not a single, unambiguous message is precisely what makes the pictures so captivating and inspires prolonged reflection. Other pictures belonging to this complex (pp. 122–123, 126–127, Part 01) indicate the extremes of manipulation and transformation that Kneffel’s method makes possible. In terms of motif, one last work belongs in this context (p. 106, Part 01). In it is the cryptic sentence: “Butter never crossed my mind.”, a comment by Johnson, in response to his client who had objected to his proposal of a beige carpet for the Four Seasons, on the grounds that that butter would leave unsightly stains.
#07
Kneffel’s practice as outlined here is remotely reminiscent of the American photorealist painting that attracted considerable attention in the early 1970s but was soon forgotten. Ben Schonzeit, Richard Estes, Malcolm Morley, and others also produced depictions with double layers (Schonzeit’s Strawberries and Watercolors, for example), wholly unrelated scenes juxtaposed (Morley’s Coronation and Beach Scene),or combined -interior and exterior views (Estes’s Alitalia). All of these rely on mirror effects and transparencies with the aim of interweaving -disparate phenomena, photographs reproduced in painting. Focused perspectives, fragmentation, mechanical coloring, and a certain superficiality were seen early on as characteristics of this stylistic direction. Photorealism sought to make clear that our reality is the result of mechanical manipulation. Accordingly, it makes obvious its own programmatic falsity. Although there appear to be certain parallels, Kneffel’s works discussed here have nothing to do with the photorealism of the late 1960s and ’70s. She does not employ mechanical manipulation based on the monocular camera perspective as a way of showing the one-dimensional appearance of things, but rather in order to create complex associations between a fascinating world of images that brings into play, in addition to formal and coloristic factors, historical, cultural, and social aspects, including modern architecture and film.
#08
Not all Kneffel’s works exhibit such a high degree of complexity. In addition to the ambitious, large-format paintings there are any number of smaller ones presenting variations on a given subject. For example, in 2013 she painted a series of small works that were shown at Dirimart in Istanbul. Their structure is always much the same. As so often, there is a foggy pane of glass on which something has been scrawled with a finger. Behind the glass are suggestions of urban situations or landscapes in different seasons, most often in winter. Here, too, photos were the inspiration. They are altogether banal motifs enhanced by what is presented on the pane of glass. In the key picture from the series (p. 133, Part 01) the scrawl is a statement attributed to Mies: “I need a wall behind me.” Why would an architect require the very element that he freed from its bearing and supporting -function and employed almost exclusively as a room divider? The wall is a an aid to -orientation, an organizing element, one that structures one’s perception of space. And perhaps behind one is some kind of protection. Artist Monica Bonvicini has -referred to this same statement, but interpreted it as an expression of power and -accordingly denounced it. Her 1995 video Wall-fucking illustrates another aspect up front (architecture is the ultimate -erotic act. carry it to excess).
This is not the place in which to try to track down other coincidental references, though one wonders why Kneffel took up Mies’s motto and accorded it such meaning. She had the sentence translated into Turkish, and painted different, though similar versions of the translation on the fogged pane (pp. 134–135, Part 01). Certain syllables and words are repeated, yet the various versions make it clear what a range of variations the Turkish language can provide for a simple statement. The audience for this painterly excursus was in Istanbul. Kneffel’s culture transfer recalls the fact that beginning in the 1920s a series of Austrian and German architects like Taut, Poelzig, Bonatz, Elsässer, etc. were active in Turkey. It is altogether possible that these connections motivated her to adopt the architect’s slogan, but she has made the formulation her own; her own attention is likely focused on a wall in front of her as the proper place to display her work. The term “wall” does not refer so much to the structural element; it is rather to be understood as a metaphor for something solid, exemplary, with which or out of which something new can be developed. Nietzsche, for example commented: “Wherever the modern spirit shelters dangers in itself, he [the artist, Richard Wagner is meant] also senses with a most mistrustful eye the danger of art. In his imagination he dismantles the structure of our civilization, and does not allow anything unsound, anything patched together in a slipshod manner, to escape: when he comes across weatherproof walls and altogether durable foundations, he immediately thinks of a way to obtain from them bulwarks and sheltering roofs for his art.”
In a nutshell, this can be seen as a postmodernist program, and in fact the statement “I need a wall behind me.” describes the dilemma of the contemporary artist, who can no longer rely on any generally accepted traditions or binding standards but requires something that s/he can use or to which s/he can temporarily refer or fruitfully further develop. Significantly, it is not the foundation on which one stands but the wall behind one that ultimately functions as support, organization, permits expansions forward and upward, but on the whole provides security and moreover leaves one’s back free.
#09
Compositions based on a luxurious bouquet of red tulips produce an entirely different impression. First there are sumptuous still lifes (p. 71, Part 01), whose blooms and leaves emerge from an indefinite background (no vase is visible). Light comes from various directions_front, side, and above_but a few flowers at the back edge are already sinking back into the darkness and changing to violet. Delicate shadows of bare branches and tree trunks and the whitish tones in this area suggest a wintry atmosphere. The two seasons, combined with close-up and distant views and direct and diffuse light, make the bouquet seem unreal. This impression is heightened by the fact that no location or specific space can be made out, so that the biomorphic sphere seems both real and surreal. Kneffel has already gone one step farther, either shifting the bouquet to the edge and making a house in the middle ground in ghostly light into a second main motif (pp. 72–73, Part 01) or setting the flowers and their vase into slight motion, or causing a television image to pop up next to the building. Such alienating effects make use of the montage principle. Moreover, the ghostly lighting evokes the eerie atmosphere of noir films. The small, two-storey house, of the type repeatedly seen in photos by Bernd and Hilla -Becher, and its neatly groomed surroundings suggest a petit-bourgeois milieu, the setting for any number of banal German television serials. But Kneffel’s static depictions are far more fascinating than the emissions of public-service broadcasters and stay longer in one’s memory. What is presented, sometimes garishly, sometimes bleakly, is a world of lifeless surrogates that is manifested in everything. The banal ubiquity, into which images of fear and menace from films are inserted, is uncanny, suggesting something hidden, suppressed, and suspicious. The only life is in the tulips, and even they are short-lived. They bend, buckle, drift out of the picture, fade, and drop their petals.
Other pictures that are limited to only a symbol or a grinning head (a smiley) belong in this same context (pp. 113 and 128, Part 01). The picture with the X symbol for “illegal” is especially convincing with its subtle blend of proximity and distance, interior and exterior, landscape and symbol. Stationary and dynamic complexes are balanced in such an intriguing way that the painting is uncommonly suggestive, in that a relatively simple subject is presented in a wholly convincing manner in painting. Since the forms take shape without hindrance and represent a certain degree of spontaneity, but at the same time fail to disturb the composition’s imbalances, the painting appears beautiful. A huge sense of freedom is manifested here, in the manner championed by Schiller.
#10
All of Kneffel’s dazzling works have something incomprehensible, indefinite, and dematerialized about them, that can be weird and menacing as well. Above all, these compositions suggest that the world can be understood only as fiction or phantasmagoria, and that for all its presence generally remains unclear and incomprehensible, for the motifs are often given a ghostly and unreal quality. As a viewer hypothetically assuming the position of the painter, one is immediately aware of this, and also possibly of something of the self-image of the artist, for whom existence and the world perhaps appear comprehensible only as “aesthetic phenomena.”
In contrast to much current painting, Kneffel’s works reveal various aspects of reality, often things that are difficult or even impossible to put into words but are nevertheless part of our experience. One looks at these works, and in doing so become aware of one’s own situation. Regarding her new pictures, one could argue with Martin Seel that they “imagine and demonstrate in what respect things are indeterminable in our relation to them. This double character is essential for everything that artworks can do. It is decisive for the inner tention, from which their inventions draw their inner lives.” Even though many of Kneffel’s subjects can be identified, their relationships to each other described, and the structure of the compositions deciphered and comprehended, this does not lead to aesthetic cognition. Analyses can lead to conceptual understanding or derive from it. But aesthetic cognition remains bound to the sensual and significative event, and thus to the specific appearance of the art object. “All art perception proceeds froman appearing and is in search of an appearing.”
Ultimately these are pictures that do not suggest any kind of liberation or show alternatives to the precarious human condition. They are works that are capable only of disclosing their meaning within the framework of art. Whereas everyday life has been completely digitalized, in Kneffel’s work one encounters one of the oldest of mediums. Painting as she practices it is by no means obsolete but a viable, genre-specific reflection on history. Naturally it is not primarily a product of historical research, not a matter of processing events from the past or evoking former worlds. This plays a role, to be sure, to the degree that the compositions of recent years discussed here repeatedly refer to Mies van der Rohe or Philip Johnson, quote works by various painters and sculptors of the classical avant-garde, and relate to works from the present or the past. Photography and film are of also of particular importance. In each case the exploitation of such sources or the adaptation of medium-specific practices is only a reflection, in that the original materials are transformed and blended with other elements like free forms and autonomous colors. The montage principle dominates in Kneffel’s work, but always in such a way that the seams between the different motifs are not visible as deliberate breaks, as in Cubist or Surrealist collages. Instead, the heterogeneous elements are juxtaposed so smoothly that the works appear to create a synthesis of contraries or a single entity out of disparate pieces. The various methods and tricks the artist makes use of in order to achieve such uniform aesthetic results can only be described from case to case, picture to picture.
Hers is a discursive style of painting that illustrates in a magisterial way how fluid the transitions from facts to fictions can be, how memories resurface or fade away, how reality blends with fantasy, and chance alters one’s intentions. Realities change. Built spaces are transformed and partially flow into each other. Different times coincide. The pictures’ present consistently manifests itself in an evocation of the past; they are expressions of an integrated synchronicity. Since present-day experience presents non simultaneous events simultaneously and contradictions in everything one sees, Kneffel’s works are symptomatic of the time. This is what gives them their meaning, so in conclusion one can agree with Gottfried Böhm that it is necessary in each case to recreate the act of seeing that went into it. Only the picture that is seen has truly become a picture. In Karin Kneffel’s paintings this idea can be convincingly traced, and that underscores the impressively high order of her accomplishment.
Armin Zweite