Sunday, May 13, 2012
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Works in extenso
At the outskirts of the Lycabettus hill. A small pathway, surrounded by nature, perceived as an intrusion to the work-force of an artist of ethnic duality and a protester of, and within, his own profession, who deliberately–I want to believe–has his studio on this venue. The artist is Andreas Kargsten; his ethnic background backfires the essence of his twofold experience – greek and swedish; his oeuvre registers his twofold dialectics, in both painting and sculpture, and could be seen in its entirety and alone as a testimony to his contemporaneous artistic identity.
Recycled pieces of wood, sporadically found as urban vestiges of times bygone, are being metamorphosed to biomorphic sculptures of geometric analogies. At other times, the development of Andreas’ abstraction is subjected to biological and botanical themes of concentric forms and overlapping voids, some of which could continue beyond the boundaries of the composition, suggesting procreation and regeneration of a cosmic order.
It is within this order that Kargsten epitomizes, yet another creative novelty. A rather minuscule piece of sculpture of nails on a driftwood is fully covered in Japanese paper, while irregular, and perhaps mischievous, slashes create a riddle, certainly not only visual, between the artist and the viewer. Does this riddle of protuberant character express the spontaneous energy of pullulation or define a working process to change what he as an artist, as well as we as viewers, give sculpture a name? The artist’s duality or the viewer’s ‘freestanding’ understanding?
Kargsten’s duality continues well into his painting too. His pictorials are either totally or never fully abstract. Monochromatic or imaginatively polychromatic, they articulate his inherent austerity. Georgia O’Keefe and Franz Kline interchange only as emanating influence. The quest and the final execution are definitely Kargsten. His abstract tableux treat the canvas within the same concerns the artist treats his three-dimensional plaster reliefs: the painting becomes the area of texture, of color mixtures, of incising deep outlines around individual shapes, of graded palette from light to dark values, as, exactly if his plaster moulds defined themselves by an incised line while the plaster was still slightly damp.
The supposed simplicity of Andreas Kargsten’s compositions reduces the frenzied proliferation of stroke, form and plane to effect works of relative restraint and clarity. The broad simplification of his use of color makes conspicuous the movement, conflict and resolution that take place on the flat surface of his canvases, creating an illusory depth, which advances and recedes according to value, overlap or shading.
Thus, Andreas’ artistic contribution and achievement becomes a documented research on the subject matter, on one hand factual, romantically imaginary on the other; a combined depiction of his own legacy in terms of his individual works in extenso, as extensive is the filtering of his own character, descent and artistic ethos.
Stavros Kavallaris
Art Historian
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