Painting from Scratch: Nora Kapfer

Hunting from a length at Untitled (2022), a compact portray on wooden that does not seem to clearly show something but scribbles in white paint combined with some traces of black, orange, and yellow, you could visualize Robert Ryman’s in no way-ending endgame of portray in all versions of white. But if you appear nearer, this affiliation proves to be inappropriate. Instead of Ryman’s allover coloration application in pure gestures, one particular discovers in the arbitrary squiggles and scribbles a bouquet of bouquets, and, sprinkled around them like pollen, wonderful particles of aluminum glitter that also really don’t really suit into a neo-avant-garde-like place. Upon even nearer inspection of the modest picture, the sizing of a sheet of paper, it is revealed that the traces of fluorescent orange and yellow are not utilized to the floor but fairly rising from the floor of the painting, in the areas exactly where the scribbles erode the white paint to such an extent that a colored history results in being obvious, uncovered in fragile traces vaguely defining the contours of petals and stems.

Nora Kapfer’s minor painting hung at the pretty starting of her modern solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Friart in Fribourg, Switzerland. Its adjacency to appreciably much larger (in comparison gigantic) paintings, every single of which generates fully distinct visible outcomes, nipped any affiliation of painting’s endgame in the bud. Black-brown, partly reflective, partly matte surfaces in which stenciled contours arise (Küriss [2018], Untitled (Salami II) [2017]) alternated with color fields overgrown by stenciled flowers in a 50 %-typical, half-irregular method (Pythia I and Pythia II [2022]). Below, motivic banality met painterly pathos (Dein Herz/Dein Garten [Your Heart/Your Garden, 2022]), the ornamental achieved the resistant, the mechanical fulfilled the gestural, figuration met abstraction, and nonorganic forms alternated with organic and natural ones. At the really finish of the sequence of paintings hung a further compact-structure wood panel, this time in black, with similar flower doodles, from which the coloured qualifications partly emerges in skinny lines. By bracketing the sequence of huge paintings with significantly more compact white and black panels—two functions that display a rapid, uncontrolled painterly manufacturing, comparable to sketches—Kapfer recommended that the will work in among are likewise about generating and letting the painting emerge from its product.

What is exclusive about this emergence is that Kapfer’s procedure of generating is normally described by opposing processes of unmaking. The earliest will work offered at Friart ended up Untitled (Salami) (2017), Untitled (Salami II) (2017), and Küriss (2018), in which Kapfer produced a mechanical approach based mostly on the software of bitumen, a tar-like liquid black substance, more than the photo floor to give it a reflective surface, into which the artist glued big silhouettes of flowers manufactured of Japanese paper that soaked up the oily things. The organic and natural structure of these papers certainly implies the surface area of a sliced salami—hence the curious title. Or is Kapfer humorously alluding here to her “salami ways,” a plan of little methods to learn the excellent maneuver of portray, of which she after just about despaired? In other paintings (not exhibited in Fribourg), bouquets and other banal and kitschy motifs (hearts, stars, stylized figures) had been applied as paper designs into the bitumen layer only to be taken out yet again, leaving visible traces of the stenciled silhouettes.

Küriss bears no recognizable motif on its floor, but the black bitumen was partly scraped off the wooden with the assist of solvent to visually reduce out checkerboard styles and cautiously stenciled circles as well as natural and organic styles these stand out from the black fields and have been partly coated once again with vinyl. The mechanical procedures of applying bitumen, cutting out stencils, gluing on paper cutouts, painting them around with oil or vinyl, and scratching the paint off all over again overlap with an car-generative chemical system brought on by the bitumen’s reaction with distinct layers of the painting, offering the floor an organic-wanting texture in some places. Of course, very well-identified methods of a quasi-photographic écriture automatique are recalled in this article, but they are recombined with further modernist and postmodernist things of painting this sort of as the grid, the stencil, the pictorial gesture, the figurative cliché, et cetera. 

Grids, stencils, and flower clichés also underlie Pythia I and II, painted in gouache, acrylic, and oil on canvas. Below, the largely mechanical, grid-like arrangement of coloration fields into which flower stencils are serially inserted was supplemented by a alternatively painterly method. The flowers instantly cite Andy Warhol’s Bouquets and refer to his Do It On your own collection from 1962, which associated the mechanical filling in of fields according to a numerical code. But while Warhol’s Bouquets expose the arbitrariness of color and its business use, and his paint-by-figures series insist on boring mechanical codes, Kapfer’s “paint-by-flowers” will work apply a relatively gestural design and style by filling the stenciled fields with obvious brushstrokes in expressive pink or fleshy rosy colours, thus undoing the mechanical outcome of the serialized sorts, particularly when irregularities split the serial sample.

Lastly, to make performs such us Untitled (Oleander III) (2021),Kapfer recycled paper cuts torn off of other paintings, gluing and juxtaposing them in their partly fragmented varieties. The overlapping styles of paper bouquets are however marked by the construction of the canvas on which they were formerly pasted, and as a result produce an organic and natural-like texture, while they just convey the product traces of their mechanical transfer. With a equivalent influence, Dein Herz, Dein Garten (Your Heart/Your Yard, 2022)recycles flowers minimize out of a further painted canvas and set with acrylic glue on the area of the new canvas, thus creating an overpainted, reduction-like framework.

Painting, in Kapfer’s assortment of functions for Friart, provides itself as a intricate layering of elements and existing archetypes (grids, determine-ground relations, monochromes, stencils), which either keep “working” independently by chemically and materially infiltrating each other, or are “counteracted” by the artist manually undoing the layering as a result of partial removing, scraping, scratching, tearing off. In the acrylic and oil paintings on canvas, it is somewhat the gestural software of paint that runs counter to the mechanical composition of the picture and the serial stenciling of banal bouquets.

Also in the painterly doodles of the small wood panels, the uncontrolled scribbling of the artist’s resource lays bare coloured paper grounds, thus demonstrating the content agency in the development of figuration. The motif in this article appears to be just a side outcome of the artist’s managing. Kapfer explicitly back links these very little paintings to reverse engineering, as invoked by the cultural theorist and thinker Sadie Plant in her 1997 book Zeros + Types: Electronic Women and the New Technoculture.¹ Plantrelates reverse engineering, a “process of examining a subject process to discover the system’s components and their interrelationships and produce representations of the program in yet another type or at a better stage of abstraction,” to procedures and discoveries by Ada Lovelace and Anna Freud.² She describes Freud’s capability to accelerate her work—the crafting of letters and lectures—by generating scribbles on blank web pages at substantial velocity, which induced her to perceive her responsibilities as already accomplished. She then extra very easily turned to the serious composing, possessing simplified it to a procedure of anticipatory principles and procedures. This strategy of “beginning in the end of any operation, performing backwards from that level to the beginning,” Plant statements, contains within just it an “invention of creation by itself,” therefore contradicting the traditional stereotype of femininity that pervades psychoanalysis, in which woman creative imagination is normally based on the imitation of the purely natural.³

In particularly this sense, Kapfer’s white and black picket panels, tellingly each and every the sizing of a sheet of paper, can be browse as inventions of the invention. Like catalysts in which the artist operates her way again to the floor from the numerous layering of colored papers and white or black oil paint in immediate movements that are as uncontrolled as feasible, they launch the concepts of a way of performing that can then be further developed in the massive paintings. In the same way hackers use reverse engineering “and pirates conspire to lure the upcoming to their facet,” as Plant puts it, Kapfer pirates both expressionist and mechanical versions of painting by “engaging in a procedure which concurrently assembles and dismantles the route back to the begin, the conclusion, the upcoming, the past.”⁴ Sabeth Buchmann, in her catalogue textual content for Friart, analyzes Kapfer’s adaption of reverse engineering as a demonstration of a correlation of organic and natural, inorganic, and cultural types, past the essentialist equation of biological progress with aesthetic progression: “Kapfer’s paintings engender that which engenders them” in the exact same way as “nature does what is purely natural to it.”⁵

But how can a portray engender that which engenders it? Can it really complete a kind of “hysteresis, the lagging of outcomes driving their triggers,” as Plant describes reverse engineering?⁶ How can portray go back again to its “source codes”? Hysteresis is the dependence of the point out of a program on its historical past. Chip reverse engineering employs methods of delayering by etching and scratching off the components layer by layer in order to find and separate its components. If Kapfer is etching, scratching off, and tearing out layers of her paintings, this, of system, does not consequence in protocols or diagrams. The consistent accomplishing and undoing of layers seems to be a way of separating painting’s things from a person a different in buy to recombine, redesign, and in truth reactivate them. 

The aspects in Kapfer’s paintings do not result in unified surfaces. Rather, they expose the ruptures in the approach of their generating and doc the again and forth of function techniques. In the oil and acrylic paintings, these ruptures choose the kind of apparent-lower strains involving different zones in which decrease layers outline the “reaction” of aspects in the layers on major. The stenciled bouquets, for example, are in no way just loaded mechanically with a person color but are painted in correspondence to the fundamental grid. They “react” to edges, strains, kinds, and products beneath them and are hence normally divided into several fields in phrases of color—fields that are derived not from the flower motif alone but from the manner of its building. In the bitumen shots, the motif is in every single scenario only a result of the doing work ways (reducing out, pasting, tearing out, transferring, scratching off, and painting above), which overlap and make results.

But what Kapfer’s works last but not least mirror is that painting, as considerably as it may be a technique, is not only dependent on code. As Georges Didi-Huberman famously place it, painting is eventually defined by the “sovereign accident” that he identifies as “difficult to review, notably in semantic or iconic phrases for it is a do the job or an impact of portray as colored materials, not as descriptive indicator.” The “sovereign accident” appears as a “symptom” that has missing its code, its information, and “opposes its materials opacity—which is dizzying—to all mimesis.”⁷ The “symptom” is a painterly result that does not “lag” guiding its “causes.” It are unable to simply just be reversed the sovereign incident can only materialize. Reverse engineering in Kapfer’s painting therefore does not end result in pure assessment of its resource codes.

The bitumen paintings, but also the paintings on canvas, go away home for all types of sovereign mishaps by managing product opacity as the fundamental code of portray, to put it figuratively. In Kapfer’s most the latest paintings,these kinds of as Pensées perdues (Lost Views, 2022), her processes of layering, etching, scratching off, and adding ever new levels of paint or figurative elements, even absolutely free-handedly painted stems and petals, which look to proliferate above the surface area, savor and even revel in the outcomes that the at any time-new superimpositions and erasures of product traces produce. The motifs, the flowers and vegetation in their different shapes and hues, are just an effect “lagging of results at the rear of their [material] causes.” The piecemeal continues to be seen. The painting is structured via ruptures of very clear-lower strains involving different zones, every exposing distinct relations of their elements and their mechanical or handbook procedure. The portray does not current an organic full but fairly a synthesis of painterly occasions, of do the job measures and reversals.

Nora Kapfer’s painting is from scratch: she basically goes back to floor zero of portray, bringing it even materially “down to earth” in the petroleum substance of the bitumen paintings. From there, the bouquets mature in the asphalt. In this sort of portray, currently being in today’s planet does not mean integrating its floods of illustrations or photos, but revitalizing its codes and eliciting a substance from even the most banal cliché by exposing the materials by itself as a creating power.

Nora Kapfer (b. 1984, Munich) life and operates in Berlin. New exhibitions incorporate Les beaux jours, C L E A R I N G, Brussels (2022) Identität nicht nachgewiesen, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Germany (2022) New Paintings, Édouard Montassut, Paris (2021) Sections, The Wig, Berlin (2021) Occur a Time, Galerie Lars Friedrich, Berlin (2020) A Home is not a Household and A House is not a House, Kunsthalle Friart, Fribourg, Switzerland (2019) Celluloid Brush, Etablissement d’en confront, Brussels (2018) 50 % a zip. 50 percent a pow, Nousmoules, Vienna (2018) and New Tar, WIELS, Brussels (2017).