Transit II

Stephan Kaluza's pictorial work consists mainly of depictions of nature, whether in blurred black and white, hyper-realistic representations (oil on canvas) or almost abstract representations of forests, water surfaces or undergrowth.

 

A supposed idyll is painted, because not everything in these images is pure nature:

disturbances creep in, appearances are deceptive. Thus these images take on a second level: the ostentatious beauty of nature in Nunc Stans, in the timeless now, becomes questionable. Kaluza transposes this thought to very personal reminiscences; among other things, he painted a swell on the Brazilian coast, in which he had almost drowned a few years earlier. So the second, background level of these paintings is, if you like, actually the first; it is less about painting the visible than about exploring what is hidden behind the power of nature and thus, above all, the central question: What is creation?

 

 

As in a previous series, The Disappeared, these images are also treated as a series. The paint has been stripped of its colour, the pictures seem to fade more and more. At the end of such a process an almost white surface remains, nothing. This approach is critically understood as an indication of human intervention in nature. For nature is neither constant nor eternal; Kaluza's

painting shows it to be fragile, destructible and defenceless. Just as nature seems to withdraw more and more from man's field of vision, so natural beauty seems to disappear altogether. For this reason, Kaluza also paints feature-length depictions of nature, a nature that has already become artificial. If Friedrich Nietzsche still understood art as a goal and as a salvation from earthly suffering, this change is almost complete; nature has already been largely absorbed by the human world.

 

The motifs in the series are divided into elements; water plays a special role, as do the sky (atmosphere) and forests. The extremely precise imitation on sometimes very large canvases is not understood here as a copy, but as a sensation after creation, which in this way wants to be understood more deeply; painting as exploration, as exploration of a world that (still) surrounds us; a world that can already be understood as a "passage station", as a mobile transit of the ephemeral.

 

In a way, imitation allows for a revision of creation, allowing for loving, rejecting, rational and irrational interventions, just as the world is shaped by rational and irrational interventions; empathy, also in the sense of interpretation and deformation, revives an encountered process of creation anew. The longing for harmony inevitably and certainly also inexplicably determines the direction one has to follow as a producer of art, and thus also the type and manifestation of the transference, what one can call art as the final result of this process.

 

Sensual incorporation through imitation is the driving force par excellence for an image producer; by filling the mould of imitation with the fascination for the perceived seen, he satisfies the uneasiness of the not-yet-possessed; only in the individual materialisation of the seen as a physically perceptible object (art) does interest and curiosity relax. In fact, it resembles a feeling of hunger for the sensual-visual that seeks its satisfaction in clinging to things by means of methods. The deepest reason for this incorporation of motifs undoubtedly lies in the longing for harmony and becoming one with what is perceived, and in a surprising and unplanned way.

See the full series ( https://stephan-kaluza.de/malerei-projekt/transit-ii.html)