Bożena Kowalska
New photo-realism?
When Knut went in for painting after his
graduation from the Gdańsk College of Fine Arts, his pictures were
not much different from those he is
painting now. There were still human figures in them, though allusive
and barely discernible, and a face would occasionally crop up,
apparently torn by an explosion of light. Yet the main motif was
texture and so it has remained. Textures appear in considerable
variety, at times reminiscent of that of canvas, at other times of a
gnarly wall, on which regular vertical scratches have imposed some
order. There is also a painting evoking associations with a hoary
window with thick water drops running down
At first glance, there is nothing new in it.
Similarly subjects were tackled on a mass scale in the painting of
matter in Poland in the late 1950s and in Europe in the early 1950s.
Yet there is an essential difference, from a technical point of view.
Matter painters created palpable textures and structures while they
are only illusive. Knut”s paint-covered canvases remain as
smooth as the surface of photographic paper. Yet the fundamental
difference lies in the creative idea behind Knut”s work. His
predecessors were anxious to reproduce an epidermis of something
created by nature to be entitled to call
themselves demiurges quite like nature. This why the pieces of
epidermis that they called to live in relief from often with marked
qualities of organic matter, were open compositions, which underlined
their segmentary character of a fragment chosen at random from a
whole spreading in all directions. In Knut”s paintings, the
rough surface is confined to a field enclosed from above by a smooth
arc. The outline and the roughness of the surface are similarly to
those of tombstones. Texture was never as regular and neat in the
painting of matter which was deliberately a-aesthetic whereas the
young painter’s works are characterized by subtlety and beauty
that should be sought in the products of refined aestheticism rather
than in the epidermis of things met in nature.
Knut”s paintings, almost monochromatic, are
in various tones of grey, each with different intensity. But
somewhere from within, either in center or nearer the edge there is a
breath, a shade of colour: pink, violet, or yellow. One is not quite
sure whether the colour originates in the painting or is an
after-image preserved in the pupil. Sometimes the uniform rhythm of
the regular, rough wall-like surface is interrupted by a
serpentine “cut-out”, an oblong piece of “fabric”
stuck on it, a trace of a diagonal “bar” or a triangle
“textile scrap” attached with minute stitches to the
”linen” surface. These perfectly illusive, small
disturbances do not seem aggressive, and if they upset the balance of
the composition, they do so in such a discrete way that they do not
really destroy anything. Rather, thanks to the textural rhythm within
these small forms, different from or opposing the overall rhythm,
they concentrate the spectator’s attention on the textural
nuance of those almost unistic surface.
Alongside series of canvases in which the shape
and the colour of matter is the main motif, Knut creates “Portraits”.
Small-sizes, intensely colored, they are
not distinguishable as images of faces, these are only allusions,
outlines of head fragments, at time with double contours: always
evasive. The young artist’s paintings reveal his rare
sensitivity to colour, to poetry of structures, to the nostalgic
beauty of what is usually evasive, what the artist has unearthed and
fixed. These works are not a reactied lessons, nor a remnant of
fascination with another’s insights. His painting is
contemplative and authentic. This is why we may expect his work to
gain with profundity and value as time goes on.