Painting from Scratch: Nora Kapfer

Looking from a distance at Untitled (2022), a compact portray on wood that does not appear to demonstrate anything but scribbles in white paint mixed with some traces of black, orange, and yellow, you could visualize Robert Ryman’s never ever-ending endgame of painting in all variants of white. But if you arrive nearer, this association proves to be inappropriate. Instead of Ryman’s allover color application in pure gestures, one discovers in the arbitrary squiggles and scribbles a bouquet of flowers, and, sprinkled above them like pollen, good particles of aluminum glitter that also do not rather suit into a neo-avant-garde-like position. Upon even closer inspection of the small image, the size of a sheet of paper, it is unveiled that the traces of fluorescent orange and yellow are not used to the floor but rather emerging from the floor of the portray, in the locations exactly where the scribbles erode the white paint to such an extent that a coloured history turns into visible, disclosed in fragile strains vaguely defining the contours of petals and stems.

Nora Kapfer’s minor portray hung at the extremely starting of her the latest solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Friart in Fribourg, Switzerland. Its adjacency to considerably larger sized (in comparison gigantic) paintings, every of which produces entirely unique visible effects, nipped any association 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 colour fields overgrown by stenciled bouquets in a half-regular, half-irregular way (Pythia I and Pythia II [2022]). Below, motivic banality met painterly pathos (Dein Herz/Dein Garten [Your Heart/Your Garden, 2022]), the ornamental met the resistant, the mechanical satisfied the gestural, figuration achieved abstraction, and nonorganic sorts alternated with organic types. At the quite finish of the sequence of paintings hung another modest-format wood panel, this time in black, with equivalent flower doodles, from which the colored qualifications partly emerges in skinny strains. By bracketing the sequence of significant paintings with considerably smaller sized white and black panels—two works that exhibit a rapid, uncontrolled painterly output, equivalent to sketches—Kapfer instructed that the functions in amongst are likewise about earning and letting the portray arise from its substance.

What is specific about this emergence is that Kapfer’s method of producing is always defined by opposing techniques of unmaking. The earliest will work offered at Friart were being Untitled (Salami) (2017), Untitled (Salami II) (2017), and Küriss (2018), in which Kapfer made a mechanical strategy dependent on the application of bitumen, a tar-like liquid black material, about the image floor to give it a reflective surface area, into which the artist glued massive silhouettes of flowers manufactured of Japanese paper that soaked up the oily stuff. The natural construction of these papers indeed indicates the area of a sliced salami—hence the curious title. Or is Kapfer humorously alluding in this article to her “salami strategies,” a coverage of smaller ways to grasp the terrific maneuver of portray, of which she when almost despaired? In other paintings (not exhibited in Fribourg), flowers and other banal and kitschy motifs (hearts, stars, stylized figures) had been applied as paper styles into the bitumen layer only to be taken out once more, leaving visible traces of the stenciled silhouettes.

Küriss bears no recognizable motif on its area, but the black bitumen was partly scraped off the wooden with the assist of solvent to visually cut out checkerboard designs and cautiously stenciled circles as effectively as organic styles these stand out against the black fields and have been partly lined all over again with vinyl. The mechanical processes of making use of bitumen, reducing out stencils, gluing on paper cutouts, portray them more than with oil or vinyl, and scratching the paint off once more overlap with an automobile-generative chemical course of action induced by the bitumen’s response with distinct layers of the portray, providing the area an organic and natural-seeking texture in some locations. Of course, effectively-regarded strategies of a quasi-photographic écriture automatique are recalled below, but they are recombined with even further modernist and postmodernist components of portray these 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 mainly mechanical, grid-like arrangement of color fields into which flower stencils are serially inserted was supplemented by a fairly painterly process. The bouquets immediately cite Andy Warhol’s Flowers and refer to his Do It On your own collection from 1962, which concerned the mechanical filling in of fields in accordance to a numerical code. But whilst Warhol’s Bouquets expose the arbitrariness of coloration and its business use, and his paint-by-numbers series insist on dull mechanical codes, Kapfer’s “paint-by-flowers” will work utilize a somewhat gestural model by filling the stenciled fields with noticeable brushstrokes in expressive crimson or fleshy rosy shades, therefore undoing the mechanical result of the serialized kinds, specifically when irregularities break the serial sample.

At last, to make operates this kind of us Untitled (Oleander III) (2021),Kapfer recycled paper cuts torn off of other paintings, gluing and juxtaposing them in their partly fragmented sorts. The overlapping designs of paper bouquets are even now marked by the construction of the canvas on which they have been earlier pasted, and as a result produce an natural and organic-like texture, whilst they just express the content traces of their mechanical transfer. With a similar outcome, Dein Herz, Dein Garten (Your Heart/Your Back garden, 2022)recycles bouquets slash out of an additional painted canvas and fixed with acrylic glue on the surface of the new canvas, thereby producing an overpainted, relief-like composition.

Portray, in Kapfer’s collection of works for Friart, provides alone as a complex layering of elements and present archetypes (grids, determine-floor relations, monochromes, stencils), which either continue to keep “working” independently by chemically and materially infiltrating just about every other, or are “counteracted” by the artist manually undoing the layering by way of partial removing, scraping, scratching, tearing off. In the acrylic and oil paintings on canvas, it is fairly the gestural application of paint that operates counter to the mechanical composition of the photograph and the serial stenciling of banal flowers.

Also in the painterly doodles of the little wooden panels, the uncontrolled scribbling of the artist’s software lays bare coloured paper grounds, therefore demonstrating the materials agency in the development of figuration. The motif below appears to be just a facet result of the artist’s managing. Kapfer explicitly links people tiny paintings to reverse engineering, as invoked by the cultural theorist and thinker Sadie Plant in her 1997 book Zeros + Types: Digital Women of all ages and the New Technoculture.1 Plantrelates reverse engineering, a “process of examining a issue technique to detect the system’s parts and their interrelationships and make representations of the program in yet another variety or at a better level of abstraction,” to processes and discoveries by Ada Lovelace and Anna Freud.2 She describes Freud’s potential to accelerate her work—the composing of letters and lectures—by producing scribbles on blank internet pages at large velocity, which induced her to perceive her duties as currently completed. She then additional very easily turned to the genuine creating, having simplified it to a procedure of anticipatory concepts and approaches. This method of “beginning in the close of any operation, doing the job backwards from that issue to the starting,” Plant promises, has in just it an “invention of creation by itself,” consequently contradicting the basic stereotype of femininity that pervades psychoanalysis, in which female creativity is normally centered on the imitation of the natural.3

In specifically this feeling, Kapfer’s white and black wood panels, tellingly each and every the size of a sheet of paper, can be read through as innovations of the invention. Like catalysts in which the artist is effective her way again to the ground from the multiple layering of colored papers and white or black oil paint in fast movements that are as uncontrolled as possible, they release the rules of a way of functioning that can then be even further formulated in the substantial paintings. In the similar way hackers use reverse engineering “and pirates conspire to lure the foreseeable future to their side,” as Plant places it, Kapfer pirates equally expressionist and mechanical products of painting by “engaging in a approach which concurrently assembles and dismantles the route back to the get started, the stop, the long term, the previous.”4 Sabeth Buchmann, in her catalogue textual content for Friart, analyzes Kapfer’s adaption of reverse engineering as a demonstration of a correlation of natural, inorganic, and cultural varieties, further than the essentialist equation of biological advancement with aesthetic progression: “Kapfer’s paintings engender that which engenders them” in the same way as “nature does what is normal to it.”5

But how can a painting engender that which engenders it? Can it really execute a form of “hysteresis, the lagging of effects guiding their causes,” as Plant describes reverse engineering?6 How can painting go again to its “source codes”? Hysteresis is the dependence of the point out of a method on its record. Chip reverse engineering works by using methods of delayering by etching and scratching off the hardware layer by layer in order to uncover and individual its things. If Kapfer is etching, scratching off, and tearing out layers of her paintings, this, of study course, does not result in protocols or diagrams. The regular performing and undoing of levels appears to be to be a way of separating painting’s elements from one particular yet another in purchase to recombine, redesign, and indeed reactivate them. 

The features in Kapfer’s paintings do not final result in unified surfaces. Rather, they expose the ruptures in the system of their creating and doc the again and forth of perform actions. In the oil and acrylic paintings, these ruptures get the kind of crystal clear-lower traces amongst distinctive zones in which lessen levels outline the “reaction” of factors in the layers on prime. The stenciled bouquets, for illustration, are hardly ever just stuffed mechanically with one particular color but are painted in correspondence to the fundamental grid. They “react” to edges, strains, sorts, and elements beneath them and are therefore typically divided into numerous fields in conditions of color—fields that are derived not from the flower motif by itself but from the method of its earning. In the bitumen shots, the motif is in each individual scenario only a result of the operating methods (chopping out, pasting, tearing out, transferring, scratching off, and painting in excess of), which overlap and develop effects.

But what Kapfer’s functions last but not least mirror is that painting, as much as it may be a technique, is not only based mostly on code. As Georges Didi-Huberman famously place it, painting is eventually defined by the “sovereign accident” that he identifies as “difficult to assess, notably in semantic or iconic phrases for it is a operate or an effect of portray as colored substance, not as descriptive indication.” The “sovereign accident” seems as a “symptom” that has shed its code, its concept, and “opposes its product opacity—which is dizzying—to all mimesis.”7 The “symptom” is a painterly impact that does not “lag” at the rear of its “causes.” It simply cannot merely be reversed the sovereign accident can only materialize. Reverse engineering in Kapfer’s painting hence does not result in pure investigation of its resource codes.

The bitumen paintings, but also the paintings on canvas, depart space for all kinds of sovereign incidents by dealing with product opacity as the fundamental code of portray, to place it figuratively. In Kapfer’s most the latest paintings,these types of as Pensées perdues (Lost Views, 2022), her strategies of layering, etching, scratching off, and including ever new layers of paint or figurative elements, even free of charge-handedly painted stems and petals, which appear to be to proliferate more than the surface, savor and even revel in the outcomes that the ever-new superimpositions and erasures of substance traces produce. The motifs, the bouquets and plants in their different shapes and hues, are just an influence “lagging of results powering their [material] leads to.” The piecemeal remains noticeable. The painting is structured through ruptures of very clear-minimize lines concerning different zones, just about every exposing different relations of their features and their mechanical or manual procedure. The portray does not current an natural entire but alternatively a synthesis of painterly occasions, of do the job measures and reversals.

Nora Kapfer’s painting is from scratch: she actually goes back again to floor zero of portray, bringing it even materially “down to earth” in the petroleum substance of the bitumen paintings. From there, the bouquets grow in the asphalt. In this sort of painting, staying in today’s environment does not necessarily mean integrating its floods of photographs, but revitalizing its codes and eliciting a material from even the most banal cliché by exposing the substance alone as a building force.

Nora Kapfer (b. 1984, Munich) life and is effective in Berlin. Recent exhibitions include things like 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) Appear a Time, Galerie Lars Friedrich, Berlin (2020) A House is not a House and A Dwelling is not a Residence, Kunsthalle Friart, Fribourg, Switzerland (2019) Celluloid Brush, Etablissement d’en facial area, Brussels (2018) 50 % a zip. Half a pow, Nousmoules, Vienna (2018) and New Tar, WIELS, Brussels (2017).

1    Sadie Plant, Zeros + Kinds: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate, 1998).
2    Elliot J. Chikofsky and James H. Cross II, “Reverse Engineering and Style Restoration: A Taxonomy,” IEEE Software 7, no. 1 (1990): 13–17.
3    Plant, Zeros + Kinds, 26.
4    Plant, Zeros + Ones, 26.
5    Sabeth Buchmann, “Systems in Bloom,” in Nora Kapfer (Fribourg, Switzerland: Kunsthalle Friart, 2022), 76.
6    Plant, Zeros + Kinds, 26
7    Georges Didi-Huberman, “Appendix: The Element and the Pan,” in Confronting Images, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2005), 248–52.