Colour In Reflex

The High-Altitude Spheres of Dialectic Thinking

by Eva Wißkirchen

Pupillary light reflexes, double lens reflex cameras, or colour-reflex shampoos—to which of these aspects (physiological, technical, or everyday) of the term in question might the title Colour in Reflex allude? It is with considerations of this kind that one is swept at once into the vortex of reflections that has been set into motion by the work of Katrin Kampmann: the paintings cast themselves upon the beholder to reveal a reflection of the latter; yet here, as always, the mirror image is greatly contingent upon the structure toward which it falls—upon the essence and character of the reflected party. As the associations evoked therein are highly individual, the vortex of reflections initially engendered between the picture and those who behold it—thereafter to be sent spinning onward—is always unique with each encounter. The semantic openness of the pictorial themes for which this generously broad, personally tinted reflection allows, is mirrored in the openness of the colour range (whether discreet or diffuse) that is integral to her compositions and proficiently plays with an aesthetic of the in-between. In this manner, Kampmann’s painting oscillates between figuration and abstraction, melancholy and vitality, intimacy and distance—between intellectual construction and a practice of controlled contingency. These disparate poles, however, are never simply left standing, or discreetly placed alongside one another, but rather coalesce, are superimposed, made to whirl about each other and to merge into an inseparable whole. Even the portraits are developed through a layering of white and coloured planes or fields, instead of through any employment of delimitative contours. The paint is most often applied in a kind of pouring process—a procedure which, with a great deal of experience, can be partly mastered yet never completely controlled. The transitions thus produced are so fluid that they finally flow into formal ambiguity. Kampmann thereby gives expression to a dilemma that is integral to her generation: the experience that no realisation, stipulation or border is ever unalterably determinate—a notion that is both liberating and unsettling at once. One yearns for a sense of control in order to defy the chaos of the information age. This same yearning, however, triggers, in turn, a reactive reflex: the yearning for unruliness and the desire to lose control altogether. To the extent that the borders are blurred in her portraits, they dissipate all the more in her landscapes. They are so acutely abstracted that the clearly distinguishable figurative elements flare outward toward the beholder like sudden flashes of enlightenment from among the tohu wa bohu, or chaotic waste and void, of a surreal dream world. In contrast to any kind of parallel from which we remain isolated, however, this dream world is in fact analogous to our shared reality—comprised as it is of dreams, desires and possibilities as much as of evident facts. The borders between these two poles (between the dreamt and the evident) coalesce and blur to the same extent as do the colour fields in Kampmann’s painting. These powerful, multifarious dualisms are what finally characterise Kampann’s work most strikingly. Through the play with these antagonisms, her pictures arouse the feeling that they are able to possess themselves of the beholder. Yet, Kampmann takes possession of the modern flood of images that flow from the Internet, advertisement, and the cinema as well—but also of the imagined images to be found among philosophy and literature. Rather than attempting to destroy or negate them, she counteracts them with painting. Through the painterly processes of selection, combination and reshaping, they are illuminated into reflections and presented to the beholder in a form that allows one to begin viewing one’s own reflection on a more elevated level. After all, reflection is comprised, on the one hand, of the same ability to take pause—the same willingness to stand still—that the selection of a motif and, later, the contemplation of an image entails, but also, on the other hand, of motion—in the form of the dialectic movement of thought that first whirls between the painter and the canvas, and, later again, between the painting and the beholder—finally continuing, within the resulting epiphanic space, to twist its way upward into ever higher spheres. It is thus then that one becomes tempted to exclaim, along with the Mater Gloriosa in the final scene of Faust: ‘Come! Rise to higher spheres!’—on upward into the high-altitude regions of dialectic thinking that are to be found in the painting of Katrin Kampmann.

English translation by Nathan Moore