about my work
 

In Keller’s hands, that device materialises in particular in the use and deployment of garishly glowing neon colours, which in their contrast to the blacks, greys and whites and the stringent geometric composition, make again and again for extremely sensual moments in the unfolding of their perception. Colour irradiating and colour reflections break the strict, cool factuality of the painting objects and have the concrete, geometry-governed picture grow on the viewer’s senses as a multifaceted visual event of perception and experience.

 

Katrin Keller’s serial paintings thus also reflect artistic currents such as the colour-field painting and hard-edge of the twentieth century, and can be read at the same time as fascinating analytical, material and visual pictorial constructions that return both to optical and illusionistic pictorial effects. Their perceptual and sensory realities are founded preeminently upon the knowledge and virtuoso demonstration of clear pictorial composition aiming at specific colour effects – the virtual sensory events, say, of colour stimuli, energy and contrasts, of gradations of colour saturation and complementary and simultaneous contrasts.

 

To that extent, Katrin Keller’s exemplary cycles of work emerge as a considered artistic, creative activity that is the spark for an infinite succession of new, diverse perceptual and experiential processes on the part of the viewers, without the works themselves forfeiting their status of autonomous art objects.


At the fore of the perception of this NEO-Concrete Art is the experience and adventure of colours, visibly applied to simple or again, multi-layered material supports. Embedded in pictorial structures of clearly articulated geometry, the colours simultaneously irradiate and subtly break open the dimensions of that framework with optical-kinetic shimmering effects, or with a new voluminosity, for example.

The completion of the work and the discovery of its sensual beauty, however, will always be acts reserved for the eyes of the sensitised viewers.


Pamela C. Scorzin, Dortmund/Milan, 2012

 


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[1] Originally in De Stijl I (1917), p. 1, Eng. translation quoted from H. L. C. Jaffé, De Stijl 1917-1931 / The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1956) p. 93 online at dbnl / digitale bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse letteren, http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/jaff001stij01_01/

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