Del Gesto a la Abstracción

Although it may seem like I am speaking or shouting, my work has no voice. Its only discourse is visual.

The work of Knut Pani is part of Abstract Expressionism, where chance, the appearance of the accident, and the fortuitous guide the flow of his plastic evolution. His obsession with the search for the unexpected event and the intrinsic nature of that accident becomes the metaphor for his work. Knut is an abstract gestural painter, as he incorporates the body into his language; it is no longer possible to accept development solely within the frame. Painting is already saturated, so by appropriating the bodily, he vitalizes it. Now everything is clear: painting will have to move out into three-dimensional space through movement, just as Jackson Pollock executes his work practically in space.

It is, precisely, a proposal where the heart of the phenomenological experience proposed by Merleau-Ponty beats. By emphasizing the relationship between interior and exterior, between volume and void, between object and space, all senses are mobilized simultaneously.

Pani’s painting reveals signs that do not lend themselves to an easy reading according to established codes, yet they belong to the most widely used codes: to the alphabet, when the succulent thickness of the impasto or the gouache suggests matter, and the compositions invite the sensual enjoyment of touch.

We find in his painting echoes of Motherwell, de Kooning, and Franz Kline, where the chromatic stain explodes and multiplies in a spontaneous display that breeds an infinity of possibilities. An emotional landscape ranging from white to black, passing through grays, a hall of mirrors of a retina that unfolds in grids and implosions. Knut Pani seeks to show the essence of the emotional gesture and to evidence, within an abstract language, the most elemental part of the human condition: man’s confrontation with his destiny. Facing the blank surface, the void that seeks to be filled with meaning, is like standing before a bottomless abyss. Giving meaning to existence is man’s challenge before life and defines his bond with the universe.

Delmari Romero Keith

Curator Flux Zone