pieces of silence

The pond that dominates the central image in Kone’s tryptich into the garden of venus (more than anything) was originally full of life like an outdoor pool in the middle of summer. It comes from the painting Fountain of Youth by Lucas Cranach the Elder (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie). In Kone’s work it is no longer any use for restoring youth, only for a melancholy sinking, however much the waiting ‘Graces’ on the edge of the pool simulate buoyancy. Pieces of silence is what the artist calls the series of drawings that he presents in an expanded installation in the centre of which the triptych stands.

The silence in the title has nothing calming about it. Prototypical peace only appears in quotation mode: Botticelli’s Venus enthroned on top of a garden temple, Michelangelo’s David finds himself surrounded by rampant technology, both are reduced to blank signs and faceless – as Kone’s figures always are. In their creative emphasis, the classical tradition and the Renaissance are perhaps not by chance rich sources for an art that adopts a markedly sceptical treatment of creative energy. The scenarios of sexual artistic potency are in the process of coming apart even if the phalluses are still standing erect here and there. The ejaculation leads seamlessly into withering and being felled; tree trunks soon become stumps. Michelangelo’s tapped-into marble hero is more of an appendage as a source of fuel for the surrounding mass of machinery, and the Goddess of Love is leaking rather than radiating.

Kone’s images have a narrative quality; recurring motifs reinforce this impression. The figures that appear are less protagonists, however, than passive observers whose proactive potential peters into self-referentiality, complete with a Narcissistic masturbatory touch. The recurring incidence of peacocks might stand for this – directly in the work just you and I (between us).

The entropic basic tone of the motifs competes with the apparent complete control in the structure and execution of the drawings. They have a hint of the ritual parallel with a strong tendency towards surface. This is dictated by objects, like the multiple appearances of plank walling in-line with the image, but also the drawing style, which integrates ornamentation, such as the swirls of cloud inspired by Indian miniature painting, and the lack of shadow, plasticity and depth.

Conspicuous is the gaining of independence of unchanging homogenous cross-hatching that reaches its highpoint in entirely covering the predella of the triptych while remaining open to figurative interpretation as the foreground to the pond. Otherwise hard contrasts dominate the image, an alternation of positive and negative forms whose compositional character becomes explicit in borderliner, who threatens to throw away his own guarantee of visual existence. At the same time, he operates on the border of the two sheets of paper that are used for the picture, placing a focus on the way the work is made. The work he is so yesterday (I am tomorrow) shows how such a self-reflective strategy clashes with our expectation for consolidated images. The general thinning-out of the illusionary potential of drawing as a medium culminates in Kone’s work at those points where the working process is abruptly interrupted, where the completion of the image is declined. The step into the real space appears paradoxical in this context or consistent as a leap into the theatrical – providing a suitable frame for Kone’s dance with sobriety.

Text by Rolf Wienkötter, Vienna, 2011 (translation from German)