The Final Liberation of Color

Time and again the artistic revolution by the “Fauves” and the German Expressionists is labeled with the catchphrase “liberation of color.” The newly won freedom bursts across the canvas in a gestural manner, gaining new momentum and orientational energy. Van Gogh enduringly introduced the combination of independence of color and dynamic brush strokes into modern painting.

There is a second thread to that catchphrase. Colors do not come together two-dimensionally and do not extend into wide bands. They concentrate in dots and create splotches, they leave touches behind. They condense into a tight mesh that denies us a close-up view and is meant for being looked at from a distance. The analytic, systematic painting touch of the Impressionists is closer to this than the painting verve of the “Fauves”. In classic Pointillism Seurat and Signac conspicuously demonstrated the systematic breakdown of colors.

Both steps established the broad basis of Hermann-Josef Kuhna’s work. Yet, in principle, he ties in neither with the Impressionists nor the Post-Impressionists or the Expressionists. In his work, dots and splotches are no vehicles for light and shadow, no reflectors bathing in the day. Contrary to Van Gogh’s works, they lack corporal materiality and the rudimentary characteristics of a relief. Without crust, they are applied flatly and two-dimensionally. They even do without the refinement and subtleness of “peinture.” At the same time Kuhna avoids the visual mixture that, for example, by combining yellow and blue, on generates green on our retina. Very early, he even leaves behind the parallels with the slow clumps of colors favored by the actual “splotch painters,” the Tachists of the 1950s.

The effect of these colors is based solely on their purity, their full radiance and power. They come directly from a tube or palette. When gradations or breaks vary their tone and differentiate it, this occurs while the paint is being prepared. The color gradations are not tonally coordinated but emerge from the coexistence of the colors. Even in the dense mesh of colors, we can isolate the smallest color particle. A dirty shade of brown is not purified but enhanced by a neighboring turquoise, while a broken green acquires brilliance and liveliness through an adjacent noble, reddish brown. Following this way of dealing with colors throughout the exhibition is worthwhile. Kuhna’s ennobling acts of combination take risks in order to systematically overcome them.

His choice of color is based on their interaction, i.e., their constellation. All compositions are built on the synergies of color – ranging from happily colorful and well-tempered harmony all the way through to the vitality of numerous contrasts. What is crucial is the liberation of each color that becomes its own master. This is the only way that interaction can result in interplay, splotch by splotch. Kuhna’s extension of the reservoir of accords, resonances and (tamed) dissonances is as good as unparalleled. Joseph Albers’ restricted palette was closer to this richness than might seem at first glance. The former Bauhaus master, however, resolved to experiment within the neutrality of the square. Kuhna, on the contrary, finds it in the lack of geometric integration and in the regular swarm of colored splotches that touch the corners, burst into flame and pulsate. The expansion serves a multi-faceted chromatics that for good reason suggests metaphors from the musical world time and again.

Yet Kuhna's pictures do not resemble an orchestra. The essential difference is that the colors do not merge to create an overall tone but that each of them remains on its own and yet becomes visible in the overall tone. Their moods and tempi can differ greatly from one picture to the next. They range from adagio to allegro, depicting an occasional pizzicato, to draw on musical analogies one last time. Colors kick-start several tempi. Orange, vermilion, crimson change in small leaps, linking color movements with quick rhythms. A light blue widens the room for movement. Pictures like “diskurs” (2009), for example, breathe swiftly and push out towards us. Side by side, interlaced warm and cold colors create a whirring choreography of splotches, as in “götterfunken” (2009).

The outlines and course of the colorful impulses are no less important. They can curve, bend, be pointed like drops or lengthened; they can be dots, circles, splotches, dabs, bars or triangles and so forth. All forms communicate, interlace, interweave – without disturbing, let alone smudging, one another. They flow and grow rampant toward each other, overcoming the classic division of figure and ground and translating it into an insoluble mesh.

This is possible because every picture is developed in several steps, through working processes in each of which colorful layers are added. As soon as the first layer has dried, the next one is added and a third, a fourth… Every session increases the concentration as well as the balance. Kuhna does not leave out any bit of the “entire canvas,” as he says, not because of some suffocating horror vacui but, on the contrary, in order to create a habitat for colored microorganisms, a swarming collective, balanced like an intact biological system. From an aesthetic point of view, the canvas appears like a fluctuating equilibrium influenced by flowing and accumulating, pushing and stopping, jostling and drifting. Central powers attract particles and set them in circular motion. In “der steinbruch” (2008), subtle whirls run over the image and flood it with rotating movements of small elements. In larger sections, “collector” (2008) depicts dark red and carmine, orange and green dots that, hardly focused, end in curves and form waves. The colors of “atelierfarben” (2008), on the other hand, bend like yellow-ocher worms on earthy ground. Bright, light turquoise splotches prevent the condensation of the intense patterns – an unusual coloristic bridging between associations of dirt and a shining sky.

Kuhna refers to his way of painting as “structural” and thus highlights a stable, master-builder element: a continuous structure of colors that is in itself layered, interlinked and networked. It would be equally possible, however, to stress a constant fluctuation that never slows down and creates a throng of truncated and cut-off color particles on the canvas. We could describe the eternal flow of movement that develops as soon as we engage with the turmoil of colors for longer than just a moment – with a kinetic jostling which does not originate from a lazy retina but from labyrinthine sub-currents in this jungle of splotches. In the past, this could even lead to raving and hallucinating. In 1975, Timm Ulrichs had the impression that it reminded him of psychedelic emotions; Kuhna's method, however, which is creative to the core, defies every self-relinquishment. Even the liveliest dynamic driving force ultimately rests in harmonious balance. Fluctuation and constellation are mutually dependent.

Does Kuhna paint “in an abstract way”? Or do his colored dabs that are nothing more but dabs and color rather tend towards the purism that since Theo van Doesberg has been considered “concrete”? The eloquent titles and determined moods, however, speak their own language that defies every existent terminology. When asked, Kuhna replied in an assured way that these titles primarily served purposes of identification. His reaction to the objection that, in that case, he could simply number them sequentially was strong disapproval and he provided detailed reasons for this. For with a certain tendency towards mystification and foreign tone, the titles evoke distant worlds or close proximity. They are entitled “lubang”, “palim, palim” (both Indonesian) or “maters” (Greek), but then also “atelierfarben”, “nervöser K.” or “verwerfungen” (by the amateur geologist). They put the pictures into an aura of exoticism or a comprehensible exclusive lesson. They dream and conceal memories and refer to literature. Using much sensory fantasy, the three “eves” (all 2009) are suggestive of curves on a center axis. Those who approach these work with common sense and some background knowledge are able to make out a coquettish game between the white, yellow and red splashes and settle for an interpretation between innocence and colorful deviation. “ellopolon,” which gives the impression of a Dadaist neologism, is actually based on an acquaintance of the artist called “Prol Elli,” whose generous curves dance through the jumble of dots. How often Kuhna slips in such erotically stimulating allusions (or how often they slip in) may remain his secret. A look at his overall work, however, reveals that the number of exposed nude contours has been decreasing since the 1970s, and more recently we can observe a decency of ominous patterns. It is easiest to understand the titles’ associations in the case of landscapes, towns and cities: “sassnitz night” and “sassnitz morning” were even preceded by watercolors Kahnu had painted in situ, under the sky of this little town on the German island of Rügen. In very different ways, during observation all titles cause confusion or point the former in a certain direction. They suggest a mood or poeticize and intensify it.

The present exhibition brings together pictures from the period 2005 to 2009. If I had to contrast them with those of previous years and describe a new Kuhna, I would certainly need to invent him. An insatiable curiosity for new and constantly changing interactions and interdependencies of colored appearance as well as immense diligence belong to the pithiest qualities of this painter. This has resulted in an experience with the reactions of colors – with their expanding, spatial, situational, kinetic but also emotional, atmospheric, thermal potential, which he has continually built up over the decades. Strictly speaking, Kuhna uses them in both an abstract and concrete way. Yet in his pictures he also takes up the amplitude of the world that can be experienced in order to entrust it to the colors and nothing but the colors. By exposing what he has acquired to the world of colors, he leaves it to the coloristic miracles of this world.

In the past, dabs and splotches could be clearly outlined and based on ornaments. If there has been a visible change over the last years at all, we could say that Kuhna’s paintings have become softer, more muted, more relaxed. Sometimes it seems as though the pigments had a more delicate nature. In pictures such as “wetterlage” or “fruits diffusés” (both 2008) fragments of color, smaller and more delicate than ever before, penetrate each other. The fierce mixture of colors is now flowing in a more measured and calmer manner. Even where turbulence occurs, it resembles the patterns found on carpets rather than appearing dangerously eruptive. In “verwerfungen,” green fountains shoot towards a blue sky. Even where Kuhna fragments the weaves in a less microbial way and leaves it at the accumulation of dots and splotches, he relinquishes strong contrasts. He softens the colorfulness by adding large amounts of white and, with few exceptions, outlines withdraw more deeply into their shell. Hardly ever before was Kuhna’s work embedded in so much gentle unfolding and homogeneous balance. Are these pictures, if not in shadow, immersed in the mild light of wisdom of old age?

It is the sensory, very personal rootedness that is the connective element between all his pictures. Therefore, every canvas reflects its own mood: a vital lyricism, from a solemnly colored shower of confetti through to melancholic twilight. For Kuhna's recherche des couleurs does not lead to color exercises. It is full of experiences, subjective and, yes, expressive even, as long as we do not consider it a big gesture but the passionate, manic act of the liberated color in its lowest denominator: dot and splash.

Manfred Schneckenburger, 2009