Cosmologies beyond the White Square

The term “Com­po­si­tion” could imply both a piece of music or dance chore­og­ra­phy. Because these art forms are expressed through sound and time, a sense of free-flowing inter­pre­ta­tion and open emo­tional response that is nei­ther lit­eral or inter­pre­tive, but rather, abstract and lim­it­less, is engen­dered in those who wit­ness such art forms. Much like more performance-based work, the work of the Swiss artist known merely as K-soul, oper­ates on lev­els far and beyond our aver­age view­ing expe­ri­ence of visual art. Cre­at­ing a series of elec­tronic dig­i­tal mov­ing image and sound pieces known as the “Jardin Cos­mique” series, he calls this new medium “light paint­ing.” Work­ing from a lab­o­ra­tory based in the Hel­vetian Alps, K-soul’s oeu­vre ranges from dig­i­tal paint­ing to light sculpture—or light jew­els.

Suzie Wal­she

The term “Com­po­si­tion” could imply both a piece of music or dance chore­og­ra­phy. Because these art forms are expressed through sound and time, a sense of free-flowing inter­pre­ta­tion and open emo­tional response that is nei­ther lit­eral or inter­pre­tive, but rather, abstract and lim­it­less, is engen­dered in those who wit­ness such art forms. Much like more performance-based work, the work of the Swiss artist known merely as K-soul, oper­ates on lev­els far and beyond our aver­age view­ing expe­ri­ence of visual art. Cre­at­ing a series of elec­tronic dig­i­tal mov­ing image and sound pieces known as the “Jardin Cos­mique” series, he calls this new medium “light paint­ing.” Work­ing from a lab­o­ra­tory based in the Hel­vetian Alps, K-soul’s oeu­vre ranges from dig­i­tal paint­ing to light sculpture—or light jew­els. K-soul takes up the medium, first ini­ti­ated by artist Ruben Nunez, and infuses it with his own sense of the “poetic motion of the spir­i­tual world [and] … smooth per­cep­tion of liv­ing forces” based in his own real-life obser­va­tions of nature. His own expe­ri­ences as a moun­tain guide inspire these per­spec­tives of the nat­ural world, inform­ing his under­stand­ing of the uni­ver­sal and spir­i­tual found in nat­ural locales.

Look­ing to mod­ern art influ­ences includ­ing Kandin­sky, Klee, Male­vich, Beuys, and Mon­drian, K-soul takes an approach that fur­thers these pre­vi­ous artists’ pur­suit of the pure and the spir­i­tual in art. Like Kandin­sky, his art­works stir the same asso­ci­a­tions with music and dance, and embody Wagner’s con­cep­tion of the Gesamtkunst­werk, as well as the spir­i­tu­al­ity emerg­ing from visual art prac­tice, a fact that must hold some links to the Ger­man Roman­tic tra­di­tion of hon­or­ing the myth­i­cal and mys­ti­cal prop­er­ties of nature, and their asso­ci­a­tion with man’s emo­tional life. Kandin­sky, like K-soul, was par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in the idea of rhythm, which he expounded upon in his On the Spir­i­tual in Life, in which he empha­sized dis­so­nance as well as reg­u­lar­ized pat­tern, a tra­di­tion that K-soul deftly picks up on and exploits to sig­nify an extreme sense of com­fort­ing har­mony, yet mys­te­ri­ous and dark ener­gies, that are slightly unset­tling. Like Klee, who was known for his inter­est in tran­scen­den­tal­ism, K-soul’s work also evi­dences the influ­ence of Ger­man ide­al­ist meta­physics. In Klee’s The Think­ing Eye, we see the strongest link with K-soul, in its look at the “sci­ence” of design, an inter­est that is par­al­leled in K-soul’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with sci­ence as well. Accord­ing to Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New, Klee saw the world “as a model, a kind of orrery run up by the cos­mic clockmaker—a Swiss God—to demon­strate spir­i­tual truth.”

In much the same way, K-soul is most con­cerned with merg­ing art and sci­ence, for as Goethe reminds us: “He who has Art and Sci­ence also has reli­gion, But those who do not have them bet­ter have reli­gion.” Reli­gion (some­what) aside, in our con­tem­po­rary soci­ety, more than ever before, as Wal­ter Ben­jamin alluded to over a cen­tury ago (in Art in the Age of Mechan­i­cal Repro­duc­tion), art today requires tech­nol­ogy, and in this age of mechan­i­cal (and dig­i­tal) repro­duc­tion, new means and modes are a necessity.

Tak­ing up where Male­vich left off with his Supre­ma­tist Com­po­si­tion: White on White, K-soul takes paint­ing into the future, by intro­duc­ing the next log­i­cal medium: time. Yet, accord­ing to K-soul, when inte­grat­ing time into the sta­tic image, you also are inte­grat­ing “radi­ant light and move­ment in it, [and] the evo­lu­tion­ary processes … [requires] sci­en­tific knowl­edge” of this process.

For this, we come back to nature, and the obser­va­tion of nature. Work­ing as a botanist, bio­chemist, physi­cist, and math­e­mati­cian, K-soul draws from his research, com­ing to the real­iza­tion that the future of art is “by the light” not “with the light.” He relies on infor­ma­tion sys­tems and dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy, using them as tools for poetry to achieve his desired aesthetic—sensuous and mor­ph­ing forms and lines of a vari­ety of tech­ni­color hues that dance and play, emerg­ing and deform­ing across the field—either in 2D still rep­re­sen­ta­tions, or in 3D instal­la­tions. For K-soul paint­ing is the first mov­ing light paint­ing in the his­tory of art, achiev­ing the merg­ing of all forms of art into one unique art­work, finally achiev­ing a total Gesamtkunswerk. The secret to this approach is that the light emerges from inside color, not reflect­ing off its sur­face, hence paint­ing is trans­formed into a mov­ing light paint­ing, height­en­ing our sense expe­ri­ences and our per­cep­tions of light and color.

Yet, depart­ing from pig­ment and embrac­ing dig­i­tal color has not been an easy path for K-soul, and has pre­sented its own hur­dles to over­come. The elec­tronic screen drains the sense of com­plex­ity and depth from the color that is so inher­ent to paint and pig­ments. Yet, K-soul has found an apt metaphor in this fact: like the modern-day man who is ren­dered ster­ile and hol­low from the drudgeries of tech­no­log­i­cal life, so too has the life of color itself been syn­the­sized, ulti­mately rep­re­sent­ing the ulti­mate spir­i­tual bat­tle in mod­ern soci­ety between light and dark­ness. Accord­ing to K-soul: For an artist, the cre­ation from a mor­bid tech­no­log­i­cal light should induce a fun­da­men­tal reflec­tion: how to pro­duce a chro­matic pro­found­ness? … By what means does one insuf­flate a chro­matic dig­nity into the artwork?

The answer? Intense obser­va­tion. By care­fully observ­ing the move­ments and inter­nal qual­i­ties of color, it is revealed through tem­po­ral­ity, and then trans­lated by K-soul through his stud­ied knowl­edge of tech­no­log­i­cal struc­tures, to open up a new per­spec­tive within a sys­tem, which allows him to re-infuse these col­ors with a new kind of pro­fun­dity and grace that is found in the realm of light. For K-soul, “this quest pro­duces the chro­matic qual­ity indis­pens­able to the cre­ation of the pic­to­r­ial work. The human biog­ra­phy becomes the biog­ra­phy of the color.” Col­ors become dynamic and alive, famil­iar and yet not, trans­port­ing us to a new kind of per­cep­tion, a new space, a new qual­ity of time.

In fact, this process epit­o­mizes what Gilles Deleuze calls “smooth and stri­ated space.” Engen­der­ing a sense of Deleuz­ian “deterritorialization”—disruption and dis­ori­en­ta­tion that enables us to exit “nor­mal” time—K-soul’s work allows us to enter into the space the “other,” of what Deleuze calls “the body with­out organs” or a space of pure sen­sa­tion absent of the struc­tures of logic and ratio­nal­ity that trap us and limit our per­cep­tions and expe­ri­ences. As Deleuze writes in One Thou­sand Plateaus:

… slow­ness belongs to the same world as … extreme speed: rela­tions of speed and slow­ness between ele­ments, which sur­pass in every way the move­ment of an organic form and the deter­mi­na­tions of organs. The line escapes geom­e­try by a fugi­tive mobil­ity at the same time as life tears itself free from the organic by a per­mu­tat­ing, sta­tion­ary whirl­wind. This vital force spe­cific to … Abstrac­tion is what draws smooth space. The abstract line is the effect of smooth space, just as organic rep­re­sen­ta­tion was the feel­ing pre­sid­ing over stri­ated space. The haptic-optical, near-distance dis­tinc­tions must be sub­or­di­nated to the dis­tinc­tion between the abstract line and the organic line; they must find their prin­ci­ple in a gen­eral con­fronta­tion of spaces, what then should be the terms of the abstract in mod­ern art? A line of vari­able direc­tion that describes no con­tour and delim­its no form.

K-soul’s Jardin Cos­mique achieve just that. Appear­ing as muta­ble as ele­ments like smoke, flames, and water, they undu­late and flicker in con­stantly mor­ph­ing shapes and forms that move through, within and with­out time and space, exem­pli­fy­ing what K-soul calls “the liv­ing forces and evo­lu­tion­ary processes of meta­mor­pho­sis.” Like the spir­i­tual works of vision­ary artist Alex Grey, K-soul also exam­ines the divine nature of exis­tence, and the vibra­tional energy fields of all of life. K-soul’s work hov­ers some­where in between, both essen­tial­ized and pure in its abstrac­tion, yet always rev­er­ent of nature and human life ener­gies.


Ulti­mately, his work rep­re­sents a cos­mol­ogy of exis­tence that is at once oth­er­worldly and com­pletely of this world, sen­sual and divine, eter­nal and com­pletely of the moment: in short the total­ized art­work once imag­ined in the last cen­tury, but never fully real­ized until now.