Clemens Krauss: Spielraum

The figures that inhabit Clemens Krauss’s paintings are faceless. We cannot identify who they are. In many cases we can only tell what sex they are. But this supposed negation suggests that they may be any one of us. There is a kind of indirect identification. By obliterating the face as a potential compositional focus and making the oil paint smudged and unclear, Krauss diverts our attention from the human face to other parts and characteristics of the painting. His paintings seem to come apart, while also suggesting a rapid dynamic characteristic of oils. 

Meanwhile, the paint itself is concentrated, giving the painting an optical effect as if it were emerging out of the plane into space and wished to be three-dimensional. The thickness of the oil paint lets us see how the artist traces his lines and, with vigorous gestures and thick paint, creates an atmosphere that alludes to the tragic contingency of the subject. Alongside this use of paint, his paintings also have an overtone of conflict and violence, solitude and destitution. The way his vigorous, gestural brushstrokes make their presence felt on the canvas is absolutely consistent with the very environment he creates in his paintings. Even if they start out from fables and fictions, they contain, above all, a true and intimate portrayal of the (tragic) relationship of the subject in confrontation with the world. It is insightful how in a single painting, even if it is filled with isolated stories or fragments from daily life, Krauss surprises us with the synchronicity between them. 

Isolation, agony, tragedy, union, love, pain, violence, fictional and real circumstances are all amalgamated to express man’s understanding and existence in the world. The way he balances these “bodies in effervescence” and their volume in the painting, achieved through the gestural use of the oils, has two consequences. The first is that the figures seem to quiver on the canvas. They leap out from the plane and seem to want to attain a third dimension. They are not content just to be images. Meanwhile, the second has to do with the use of the word “effervescence”.