In Silke Otto-Knapp’s new works rooms, screens (partitions, windows,
paintings within paintings) and stages together form a picture of what
painting could be as a space of appearance: spaces become screens;
screens become paintings; paintings become stages. As figures and their
backdrops emer... Read more
In Silke Otto-Knapp’s new works rooms, screens (partitions, windows,
paintings within paintings) and stages together form a picture of what
painting could be as a space of appearance: spaces become screens;
screens become paintings; paintings become stages. As figures and their
backdrops emerge from colours and surfaces these painted forms reveal
themselves to be exactly what they are, while exploring the settings in
which women have appeared and performed throughout the history of
modernity.
A figure around which a number of the scenarios converge is Florine
Stettheimer: painter and host to salons in the apartment on West 58th
Street shared by her and her sisters in the 1920s and 30s.
In vain, Feder attempted to explain to Florine, to Virgil, to me,
to anyone who would listen, that there was no such thing as white
light in the spectrum – that it was obtained by the expert mixing
of primary colours projected through various shades of red, blue
and yellow gelatin in the two hundred or more projectors with which
he had covered the ceiling and sides of Chick’s theatre. Florine
repeated that she wanted clear white light – as in her model. Feder
refused to believe her. For three successive nights he had the
escape artists and his crew clambering up and down ladders,
changing gelatins, which he then blended with infinite care and
skill at diverse intensities. And each morning, when he proudly
exhibited the night’s work to Florine, she would say quietly that
what she wanted was clear, white light. Reluctant and unconvinced,
he finally gave it to her at dress rehearsal, and she was grateful.
He had a more rewarding time with the blues and greens of the
second act at picnic and deeper cobalt of the Spanish sky darkening
for the appearance of the Holy Ghost and achieving a livid splendor
during the procession in the third.
Motifs depart to and return from different places. There are scenes
from Ingmar Bergman, echoes from Chekhov’s Three Sisters, revenants of
the Bronte sisters, perhaps, and many other figures, confronting the
gaze or turning away, towards and from each other.
Otto-Knapp’s new paintings project different scenes, moments and
constellations, yet do not follow a central plot, biography or
choreography. What the paintings foreground rather is the moment and
motion of appearance itself: the way spaces open up, and how figures
make their appearance on the stage of these spaces. And the making of
appearance is also always what painting does as a medium, creating
visibility in its own particular mode. It is these two modes of
appearance – social and painterly – that Otto Knapp merges, dissects
and recomposes in paintings which address their own form in the same
breath as affirming presence.
