Karl Klingbiel, over the past four years, has produced different bodies of gestural, abstract paintings notable for their coloristic range, radiant intensity of mark making and a felt, vibratory undertow which animates their complex surface structures. Klingbiel’s use of lacunae, or voids, which are the result of a steady stream of often-minute adjustments in the adding or the taking away of paint, form the essence of his approach to picture-making. Of these measures Klingbiel says: “I know the painting is finished when adding and taking away become the same thing… When this happens I don’t capture the elusiveness I am after but allow the context for the elusive to emerge… For example in scraping something, some section away, something is given back to me that I couldn’t have anticipated. When this happens universally, the adding and subtracting becomes the same thing.”

That interchangeability of pictorial space does indeed occur as part of the working process for the artist. Klingbiel starts off his paintings in a prescribed way that is antithetical to the expressionist spirit. Rather than allowing himself to respond exclusively to some internal drive at the onset of his painting process, Klingbiel replaces instinctual impressions as a beginning point with a large, establishing “skeletal” structure on paper using black Japanese ink and gel medium. These configurations have a correspondence to pre-modern source imagery that Klingbiel has collected from books, magazines, and from his own travel notes, drawings and photographs. These comprise a variety of far-ranging references: a 1227 AD Buddhist thangka from Central Asia inscribed with an image of a monk; Perseus Liberating Andromeda, a 1545 tapestry from the workshop of Coecke van Alst; a decorative pattern or spatial configuration from a 19th century illustration of a sailing vessel from a British men’s magazine; scenes from Katsuihika Hokusai’s woodblock print series The Illustrated Canon of Loyalty; a lithographic print from a Robert Havel edition of Audubon’s Birds of America; or cartographic patterns from Karl Henrici’s 1893 Map of Aachen. And so on.

Such source material engenders a set of correspondences for the artist. His reactions to these are transferred into black somatic markings or traceries using the ink medium on a piece of glass which is then used to create a monotype on paper. This print is glued onto the wood panel which is the material Klingbiel prefers to use as the surface for his paintings. This ungiving surface allows him to use a variety of tools—spackling knives, squeegees and rags, as well as brushes, to create the slippery, fugitive planes in his work. This initial, printed structure is made up of what the artist refers to as “approximations halfway between a mark and a representation.” This black and white template, whose markings are then covered up using gel medium, encaustic and white paint, producing what the artist terms both a “barrier” and a “membrane,” becomes a loaded ideational plate onto which Klingbiel’s readings, projections, associations and thoughts come into focus. It also serves as a point of resistance to the subsequent process, a kind of inherent “identity” possessed by the painting alone, as its configuration is the result of more chance than intention.

Klingbiel’s process, with its stark markings and black skeins forming seemingly ambiguous designs or patterns, is faintly reminiscent of Sigmund Freud’s wunderblock metaphor, in which a child’s toy-tablet is an analog for the mystic writing pad onto which is inscribed the repressed contents of the unconscious. Klingbiel replaces the lax notion of the unconscious, however, with what he refers to as the “detritus” of intention, more akin to the Buddhist notion of karmic residue. The loose configurations also recall in a distant way Herman Rorschach’s creation of abstract designs meant to serve as a projective psychological test of personality, though for Klingbiel, this becomes more about a kind of pre-lingual understanding of the “way things are” rather than an objective identification of such as filtered through some notion of psychology or personality. In any case, the artist’s self-induced flow of contingencies, which emerge through the printed layering of his responses via these black calligraphic-like forms, allows transcription work of a deep order to begin for the artist. The use of these saturated black forms as the formal genesis underlying the painterly work is an essential foundation for Klingbiel’s approach and activity. They also form the foundational element for his need to keep himself on a point where he is constantly losing and regaining control of the painting, which is replicated throughout the process, and which serves as a thematic analog to the “adding and taking-away” of the paintings’ physical properties. These structures sometimes reemerge as lost heralds through various layers of paint, particularly on the edges of several of his works (Blue Duc Thol (2005), Palantine (2006–7), Hive (2006)) and sometimes more overtly in earlier work as in Tractor-Trailer (1996–2002). The artist uses this schema of black lines under a white ground to foment a play of resistance where color would seem routine and homogeneous, and would distract from the choreography of the structure-building. The subsequent skeins of paint, punched up with shapes and forms and movement have fascinated me and I believe their use comes into play because it allows for the animate activity of the pictorial surface to ultimately coalesce into what Klingbiel refers to as “stillness,” the paintings’ ultimate duty.

Klingbiel’s mark making activities, in terms of actual painting on his prepared surface, stirs up the different stratum and substratum of histories causing them to both veil and unveil themselves in his work. He ends up rewinding various histories, scrambling them and playing them back for us (interpolated, interposed, displaced) in a fresh way. It is the artist’s attempt to create a new historical narrative in which he retraces a lost, “secret” composition of (late) modernism by looking at precedents that modernism took upon itself to inhabit in order for it to become itself. Paint, mark, touch, light, tension, rhythm, texture reveal themselves slowly in Klingbiel’s work as a sense of quietude settles upon it. His unique process of painterly and gestural distillation brings out an ethereal out-of-time quality. The consequent sensation of stillness brings our attention away from historical teleology in which modernism made materials and process subjects in themselves, and before postmodernism questioned the viability of those very subjects. Paradoxically, Klingbiel’s works are also deliberately time-bound in ways other than the stretching of the long elapsed period it takes for the viewer to “read,” fully, each work with all of its nuances. Of his paintings’ palimpsest layerings the painter says “…when I see a woodblock print, then a Giotto fresco, say, I respond to a “mass” in one as it relates to another “mass” in the other. I want to find my own relationship between these two without having to think in pre-conceived “modern-idioms.” What I end up with at the end of the painting isn’t a set of relationships but rather a ghost of a set of relationships, nothing overt. Something hidden, something furtive is expressed because that furtiveness is true to my experience as I walk around in the world.” Klingbiel’s approach is to preempt as much as possible an intellectual or intellective post-modern “deconstruction” of history which inevitably would arrive at prescribed endpoints only to illustrate a certain pre-allowable logic. The surface relationships in the paintings depend not on themselves alone, but on a series of relationships we can’t see or even fully comprehend, but that we know, instinctively, exist.
 

BLU DUC THOL

PALANTINE

HIVE

Structure is Klingbiel’s special strength, allowing his image-combinations—his confident handling of paint that interleaves, layer by layer, a complex stratum on which rest the final marks—to occur and coalesce. The surface structure, while it often has much variation in it as we go from painting to painting, nevertheless adheres to a certain consistent logic. The viewer experiences individual fields of surface handling and coloristic passages, which at times tend to constellate around a small, centralized emptied area (Medicine Tree, Palimpsest, Blue Duc Thol); at other times arenas of energy bundle themselves up in loose or tight configurations and either splay themselves out in arrhythmic swathes of imagistic juxtaposition, as in Tunis (2007) and Pilgrimage (2007), or are stacked as individual segments resembling groves or intersections of embedded activity which cover most of the pictorial surface, as in Hive (2006). In Arum (2007) a scaffolding of gestural units are piled up in a vertical stage on the left side of the painting while elsewhere the individual gestural activities constellate around a voided area comprised of a scumbling of blueish tinges offset by violet slashes below it and rose and umber swatches above it. In Protective Astrology and Explained by The Nurse, both completed in 2007, Klingbiel’s mark making and touch exert a strong visual resonance by incorporating few but large and dramatic juxtapositions using unitary strokes of color inlaid with contrasting colors, creating cloisonné effects. In Protective Astrology, the artist creates generously distinctive passages with a spackling knife, using gray-yellows and blues to great sweet/sour effect. What predominates is the sensation that in each work, each of the various areas has found its individual order and its place compositionally according to a logical, if fugitive, order. The sense of cohesiveness and its interplay with contingency brings about an animate bid for space and volume on the part of each small field of activity as it nestles within or without its inevitable final placement in the larger scheme of things. Cohesiveness is at times muted, diffused or kept under wraps as in Tablet (2005) in which one senses a commotion between planes of color and forms, seemingly behind a veil.

An overview of several of the artist’s earlier works gives us insight into the evolution that has led to his current set of concerns and intentions. It is engaging to look at the artist’s reductive work from the mid-to-late Nineties to see this development. He refers to himself, today, quite intentionally, though not provocatively, as a minimalist—a painter whose essential task is to distill his influences to this point of “stillness,” eschewing expressionistic outbursts while not-forgoing what he terms “the dirt of life” in his work while doing so. He says: “I can’t paint in a conventionally minimal way, although I have done so. It doesn’t sustain me. I need to allow for the dirt of the world…. I don’t believe in the existence of purity but I believe in the pursuit of purity—I don’t feel this is a contradiction.” The movement away from works such as Subscription/Union and Subscription #5, both from 1997, whose geometric formats and simple color codes are geared toward resolute optical clarity and balance is perhaps foreshadowed by the nascent concerns of Truck 2 (1995). Here, combined systematized geometric progressions of black lines with what appears to be overall abrasion marks and residual traces of color are the result of mark making under the effects of automatism and alterity. The urge to clarify the confrontation between two alternate sensations or methodologies (a logical and alogical mind-set) takes a critical turn in a work such as Variation on Subscription (1997); playing off of hidden realities in which a geometric field of white and orange blocks of color seem to hover over a darker, more naturalistically oriented color field below. Riverboat (1997–8) shows Klingbiel’s growing tendency in bringing ostensible gesture and contour to his strict minimalist configurations in order to give greater depth and allegorical fullness to his color planes. He does this successfully with greater nuance and transparency than ever before, as he begins to bring a point of clarity to what appears to be visual experiments in which mechanistic and, for the first time, furtive, dynamics are being played out. This work, with its luminous palimpsest quality, is emphasized by the artist’s use of collaged strips of woodblock prints on rice paper so as to offer literal as well as illusory depth to the viewer. By 2001 with Rufus, Klingbiel finds himself making a montage, literally, of the various techniques and spaces which will find its harmonious integration in later works such as the hierophantic 344/279 and 391/398 (both 2004) with their use of black ground to bring out the tantric color associations, and in Untitled #17 and Palimpsest (both from 2004), the latter with its central burst of energy. Rufus, with its ferociousness and delicacy combined, brings into play the obstinate underpinnings of painting that compel Klingbiel to this day: continuous dislocation and displacement related to gestural mark making; printmaking and calligraphic notations; luminous transparency effects, intensified by the stacking and layering of planes; and subliminal geometric ordering.

Klingbiel’s essential drive is to reduce and distill, a process and direction which he associates and analogizes with the minimalist tendencies he finds most clearly in sculpture, citing Donald Judd’s work, which as “pure object” appears to be self enclosed, pushing energy away from itself in order to draw the world toward and around it, centripetally. Of this effect Klingbiel comments: “…by pushing away the world, it animates it through its emptied-out core. The core in a Judd work is directed toward everything around it, through distillation…In my work the action is the same but in reverse. Everything, all my animated content, my mark-making collapses into itself… What I think of as my own “unified field” theory. The result is a twin movement: the painting dissolves into stillness by shutting itself down yet there remains plenty of painterly activity on the surface to experience as well. My works are inaction paintings rather than action paintings. Animated content allows my paintings to shut themselves down… The choice to paint this way is the most unifying way to distill, to translate all these different things and my experiences of them.” Klingbiel would argue that his reductive tendencies concern distilling his various mental, psychic, and somatic experiences with the “idea of the relationships” he sees in his visual source material; what he calls “matrices prior to cognition.” The artist’s action of distillation sets into motion a shutting-down energy which acts centrifugally as it brings energy to itself through the core of each of his paintings. In this way recursive time resembling that in a minimalist artwork is produced through duration, as opposed to the instantaneous all—or the pervasive out-of-time time of abstract-expressionism. The artist says: “When I respond to different source material I am attempting to create a system which associates one internal relationship with another internal relationship. I am after the idea of relationships, or the ghosts of relationships as different histories, traces of histories uncover, discover themselves, veil and unveil themselves, their ‘bones exposed’ through demarcation points, transition areas themselves in transit. I distill to get to stillness.”

Stillness and vibrancy, pre-meditation and improvisation are at an equal pitch in Klingbiel’s Dr. Behrens (2006). It is a sumptuous work. Its passages consist of small steps and gradations of color and light while a sense of harmonious balance and naturalness pervades the work. Named after the sanatorium doctor in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain whom the author takes pains to depict as an amateur portraitist incapable of getting in touch with the spirit of conjuring a likeness of someone. Behrens knows too much of the wrong thing, his hand is guided by the physiognomic structures that he has been trained to imagine and analyze. Behren’s brush is guided so much by his intricate biological knowledge of the technical underpinnings of how the human body works and why a particular body looks the way it does, that it has made him imaginative only in the barest sense of the word. What is evident in Dr. Behrens is that its structure is the result of an analytic mind attempting to and succeeding in relinquishing a pre-determined, controlled “understanding” of the way a dynamic of adding and taking away surface layers should end up looking. The sensation one receives is that in Behrens’ portrait of Mme. Chauchet, its “look” has been generated by monolithic, immutable conditions unique not to his subject but to anyone who might become one of his subjects, and only as applied by Behren’s self-proclaimed genius for his area of expertise. Behrens can be imagined as a stand-in for abstract-expressionist painters and their heroic manual activities, associated with their individual “touches” or “brush strokes.” Klingbiel isn’t, in his painting, trying to emphasize material trace over painterly activity or emphasize unified image over expressive detail a la “American type painting” via the Greenbergian formula. Nor is he insisting on a formal precept advanced by Harold Rosenberg’s definition of “action painting” in which expressive detailing is made to predominate over a visual “gestalt” and where painterly activity is heralded as superior to the gesture’s material trace. The equivalent in pictorial terms to emotional outbursts in this type of work, the signature cast of traditional ab-ex painting, is wholly absent; quite the opposite. It is fruitless to evaluate Dr. Behrens through an ab-ex lens as the visual features are of a different order. The frame of mind that is in evidence is clearly of an analytical cast invested in seeing itself reinvent (even through abnegation) its own responses to itself. While the tug between the subjective impulse and the objective sensation that qualifies that impulse or memory of such an impulse or drive is always part of the equation in any coherent abstract work; Klingbiel’s aesthetic drives are clearly not tethered to the address of this subjective-objective dialectic as the generative core source of the energy in his work. Nor is this dialectical play the causal reason for the type of internalized energy that seems to pulse in timely beats throughout this painting. Dr. Behrens is certainly controlled and calculated, even as it seems relaxed in a centered type of way. There are seven major quadrants and internal sections within the larger areas of painterly activity starting at the bottom and center that appear to be scaffolded in a counterclockwise direction. These areas have a yellow-orange “spine” which forms an arc that loops from the bottom right corner up to the curves towards the left of center of the painting and then ends its trajectory at the top center of the work as it continues to move towards and ends at top center. This type of veiled control is evident throughout the later work. Medicine Tree (2006), for example, a work from the same time period, has larger passages of color and understrokes of paint than Behrens. These passages, or matrices, arrange themselves as constellations effected around a small vacated center. This work embodies pictorially the reverberating centripetal energies that course through all of Klingbiel’s works to various degrees. Regardless of overall configurations, the passages of color and marks embody this ethos no matter what size the work.

Karl Klingbiel’s work invites repeated viewings because it is subtle in its material poesis. There is much to take in. To try to hold all of it at once can only be done with varying degrees of success. While the work can be apprehended instantaneously on one level perhaps, it takes time for it to reveal itself fully, if it ever quite does. What it does do is eventually settle into its own stillness, even as it constantly slips back out again. There is an analytical framework which surrounds each painting, and there is as a deeply sensual aspect to each work as well. Recognizing that this duality is an aspect of the vision that created it helps us to see and appreciate that the unexpected occurs constantly, and it is to be taken into account at just the right pitch of awareness. This allows for the deep energy we feel in the work to never seem bombastic or formulaic but rather to appear to be charged with self-effacing mindfulness, a characteristic of profound importance to the artist. The work appears to be about reduction and transformation as much as it is about veiling and circulation. As the artist remarks, “In terms of control, my paintings come and go. The key is to always keep a dynamic going and not allow it to become over-determined.”

Dominique Nahas is an independent curator and critic based in Manhattan.

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