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While the paintings in my first show Mini Me Mary (2019) were produced in dialogue with reductive abstractions by Mary Heilmann, these new paintings refer to the European painting tradition from the 15th to the 20th centuries. This series arose in direct response to my long visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, during the pandemic fall/winter of 2020-2021.
During that period of abandoned metropolis, I usually had each museum gallery mostly to myself. This experience, and the greater social isolation – including the impossibility of visiting my home in Germany – enhanced my way of looking at painting in a contemplative way. It also rekindled my in-depth study of color and pictorial space. This study is located in the painterly technique of specific color layering, and how it can bring forth calmly vibrating shades, physically flat but endlessly expanding.
The Old Masters’ technique of color layering had already entered my painting years before, while I worked to ensure “Color is the carrier of emotion” in my work, as critic John Yau described [1]. Together with my reductive mark-making which is related to American paintings tradition, my technique anchors my method of filtering feelings and thoughts through layers of color and marks. The paintings produced then serve as a place of self-connection and expression — art as a living space.
Now, in my current body of work, I apply this process to delve the Old Masters’ accumulated tones. By feeling through selected paintings, my evolving pictorial spaces become vehicles to explore and connect with art history – and, in a greater sense, with human nature – while my standpoint remains very personal.
At once meditative and a record of spontaneity acted out, these small paintings evolved over time in the studio into rich organisms. Initially meant as studies or visual notebooks, their spaces grew from all angles and sides, both front and back. They merge the force of reduction with the fact of being well lived-through, as remnants of an intense process. Like rock relics, it is their dense sensual expression that defines their expansive quality.
Through developing these paintings, a new space has also opened up, to allow me richly felt connection with the world again – as if via these shades, through my layering of these colors, I can feel my way (back) through time and space. And, it’s as if there’s something else in these layers: pictorial spaces which seem to “know” all the different shades of humanity, which have always been there, and always will.
Jule Korneffel
[1] John Yau “Color Is the Carrier of Emotion” Hyperallergic, March 24, 2019. John Yau is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He has published over 50 books of poetry, artists' books, fiction, and art criticism.
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