| The New York-based artist John Kleckner opened his first solo show in Berlin on November 11th. Here, he exhibited a choice selection of his most recent works on paper. John Kleckner’s images can be described in many ways. His work could be explained as proto-emotional, pictorial phenomena employing metaphors of biology and evolutionary ecology. His works depict human beings in states of transformation. The people portrayed inhabit lush natural realms and are transformed into unexplained physical states and are pushed into the obscure crevices of metaphysics. |  |
Depicting the Wild, One Nano-Stroke at A Time – Matilde Digmann
The New York-based artist John Kleckner opened his first solo show in Berlin on November 11th. Here, he exhibited a choice selection of his most recent works on paper. John Kleckner’s images can be described in many ways. His work could be explained as proto-emotional, pictorial phenomena employing metaphors of biology and evolutionary ecology. His works depict human beings in states of transformation. The people portrayed inhabit lush natural realms and are transformed into unexplained physical states and are pushed into the obscure crevices of metaphysics. They evoke a revelatory exposure of the artist and the inner self at large. Working alone in an intemperate and tiny space not accessible to the handicapped, Kleckner does more than tip his hat to the monastic, technical masters of the 15th century. His recent work functions as an esoteric example of meditative contemporary art, something that gratifies the eyes as the gaze is lost in the hundreds of thousands of nano-strokes. The evidence of such labor defies expectation and subverts the practice and production of the ready-made appropriators who exhibit in the year A.D. 2006.
Looking at both Kleckner’s work and back at the old masters, the Dutch artist Albrecht Dürer, specifically, springs to mind as a comparison. Like Kleckner, Dürer was a subtle and cunning rebel of his time with his uncanny depictions of reality, which each had a razor sharp precision but were, however, always added onto with an unworldly twist since the amount of detail exceeded what the human eye would actually be able to detect. The same kind of play with reality can be found in Kleckner’s images, which each make the things we cannot see visible to us. Dürer’s most famous image is the self-portrait from the year 1500 in which he, in one face, managed to unite the masculine and feminine, the barbaric and the civilized, the divine and the secular—an image which has been said to bear a striking similarity to depictions of Jesus. Janson described it best when he said, "the solemn, frontal pose and the Christ-like idealization of the features assert an authority quite beyond the range of ordinary portraits. The picture looks, in fact, like a secularized icon."
Kleckner also seems to be a master of mixing different worlds and of combining references—both real-life and art historical—as he draws his spectator closer into his world within where humans become icons. With a languorous softness that defies the difficulty of the formation of its parts, Kleckner’s works fulfill the exhibition space and do not fail to hold the viewer at rapt-but-friendly attention.
Nature seems to play a specifically important part in Kleckner’s universe, as man grows into nature and the two are intertwined in a way that makes it hard to tell where nature stops and where man begins. For example, the untitled work where mushrooms pile out of the mouth of a man whose snake-like hair reminds one of the mythological Medusa, the question arises: who is in control here and who is taking over whom? The world of Kleckner is full of symbols that can, first off, be hard to decode.
The same thing is at play in another of Kleckner’s works in which a man covered in fur rises from the earth in a forest and finds himself surrounded by animals. Here, Kleckner depicts a serene and peaceful scene that can be viewed as nothing but ironic in our day and age, but which also bears a strange, melancholy reminiscence to the bellowing deer and times that seem forever lost. It is, however, not Kleckner’s intention to depict an idealized and glossy, fairytale-ish view of the world, as nature in this case seems to have overcome the man—whose body is overgrown by fur and whose hair is caught in the branches. But the works are also extraordinarily beautiful as they take the viewer back to an authentic yet surreal state of being where reality is far removed from the concrete jungle and instead depicts the wild windings of (human) nature. Thus, we’re not witnessing a controlled and aestheticized nature that is there only to please our gaze, but rather an untamed and wild type of nature that, slowly but surely, wins the fight as it creeps into everything and takes over both our minds and bodies.
The technique employed by Kleckner also has an early Netherlandish feel, as his detailed ink and watercolor drawings show an admirable amount of control, taking us far into a different world where things are turned upside down and yet remain realistic in a creepy and unheimlich sort of way. Kleckner is represented in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY (The Judith Rothschild Collection of Contemporary Drawings), The Saatchi Gallery, London, and his works will be featured in the exhibition "The Triumph of Painting: Which Reality?" at The Saatchi Gallery, London in Winter 2007. John Kleckner will also be on view at Peres Projects, Berlin (Schlesische Str. 26, Berlin-Kreuzberg).
