Cubic Worlds
Committed to spatial illusion. Christoph Kern uses old master knowledge of the material of
painting with almost scientific obsessiveness to ‘breed cubes’. In his investigations he follows
various tracks: cubes imploding in space, gyrating in science - fiction – like structures that evoke
connotations like Star Wars or Kubrick’s 2001. Or monolithic cubes that seem to all but eliminate
pictorial space in their attempt to push towards and flow over the edges. And, most recently, a
focus on futuristic landscapes that appear to have been generated by the cubes themselves, yet in
which the cubes tend more towards dissolution. Kern’s paintings are an accumulated history of
their own making. They are built up of many layers, beginning with the initial scenario under
investigation, setting the scene. With each progressive layer, the cubes’ evolutions, their growth,
colour, position and movement in space as well as their relationship towards each other is traced,
the positions at which they arrive are tested and pushed towards a point at which the image can
rest. This stage is documented before the painting process continues. Pentimenti and animated
films show the different stages of one painting’s transformation and are a way for the viewer to
share in its evolution.
Christoph Kern confidently asserts the idea of the painting as a window to the world, the notion
modernism worked hard to dispense with. When the cubes infiltrate the baroque stage-like
landscapes, as representatives of the abstract and rational, the controversy over space is
sustained and mediated by Kern during the painting process, thereby pitting the modernist tenet
against a knowledge of the long history of painting that has gone before. For him the main
challenge is not to ‘people space with cubes, but to push the painting towards a point when the
cubes will have created their own environment’ and these two divergent ideas that were deemed to
be incompatible will have undergone a transformation that has made for a world that as a painting
is a believable, convincing entity.
(by Nikola Irmer)
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