Vincent Kück: Forms of Disappearance

Lea Schäfer: "Formen des Verschwindens" (forms of disappearance) is the poetic title of your first solo exhibition at Emde Gallery. What dimensions of your artistic work do you encompass with this title?

Vincent Kück: For me, the title "Formen des Verschwindens" embodies several levels. First of all, on a technical painting level: by using tape and latex, I cover up areas on the painting that I can remove again after a layer of painting. Thus, areas are partially brought out again from lower layers or simply painted over. In combination with spray paint, this technique allows me to smooth out my own signature, the painterly ductus, the drawing, in other words, all my personal idiosyncrasies that make it obvious that I have made something.
And further, to me disappearance means the dissolution of a certain perspective. The composition plays with our visual habits and provides a sense of spatiality. I try to find picture puzzles with the means of painting: Something like the picture puzzle in which you can see a profile of a face or a vase. You can only see one thing at a time, it's always jumping back and forth between foreground and background. This produces an alternation in which the gaze sometimes enters the room or encounters a closed form and is repelled.

LS: That means that as a viewer you can't locate yourself in the picture and take up several points of view. The painting is no longer a window to the world, but has very different forms. What does painting itself mean to you?

VK: I start from an I-perspective, imagine this I as a membrane between an inside and an outside. Both the view inward and outward is a view that eludes me, or rather what I look at eludes me. That is, there is something like a subconscious inside of me that I cannot access, outside of me is the world that I cannot access. I can address certain things, but they are always separate from me.
For me, painting is a way of examining these constellations and dissolving them to some extent. Within an aesthetic perception, one steps out of everyday thinking, is able to set aside rationality and perhaps feel something like timelessness. Expressed somewhat pathetically: one feels connectedness with everything. But this must always happen in a secured and protected framework.

LS: When does aesthetic perception take place? Are you in such a state when you work in your protected place in the studio?

VK: I believe that aesthetic perception takes place always and everywhere. One always receives stimuli. From the outside world, however, everyday, rational thinking predominates, in which one includes and excludes things and uses linguistic logic and concepts. In a protected setting, one can fall into an ego oblivion. This can also happen in everyday life. It is not necessarily linked to the work in the studio. It is independent of the medium, because it doesn't necessarily has to happen visually. It can take place through other sensory channels and, in my perception, has something to do with the merging of the senses. In a state of immersion, shapes are sometimes associated with certain sounds, tastes, etc. Ideally, all the senses combine into a single sense.

LS: Are all your senses engaged in the studio? What does your protected space look like where that happens?

VK: In music, for example, there are rhythms that cause you to dream yourself away. Stimuli from outside that could interrupt this structure would be a hindrance. I listen to music very often. The tactile, the repetition of hand movements, touching the canvas or the materials and tools, is very important to me. Painting is by no means a medium for me that functions only through the visual.

LS: So the material plays a big role in your process. Your works with their painted edges are telling. What does the process look like? How do you start and what has to be ready for you to start?

VK: I start with a primer of black acrylic paint. White primed canvases would be too full and too hermetic for me. Black paint is a total reset for me, a zero point. The second step is to lay an even grid over the canvas with tape and paint it with spray paint. Based on this grid, the next layers are applied. It's a slow approach to a diffuse idea of composition that I have to feel my way out of, rather like a fog. For me it feels like I can use my own eyes, as if they were tactile tools, as if they were hands.

LS: In your painting, the grid recurs as a motif and starting point. Where does the grid come from?

VK: It comes from an overload of painterly gestures. In the past, a cramped state has set in with me, so that I could not paint canvas or paper with brush or pencil. For me, the grid is a starting point for a pictorial structure on which I can base myself for the time being. In more complex works, I dissolve it piece by piece with the layers to discard the meticulous work and allow free and random things.

LS: There are three larger groups of works in your oeuvre: There are the larger complex works that you just mentioned, in which there are an incredible number of layers on top of each other, which thus free themselves from a clear structure and open up a new perspective. In the rather smaller works, the pattern or grid is pictorial. These can be divided again into more graphic works, with clear surfaces and shapes, and those in which gesture takes over in the process. Where do the three groups come from? Did all the works that can be seen in the exhibition develop out of a preoccupation with the grid as different ways of playing?

VK: It all comes from the grid. The smaller works are almost like an index of different structures, colorings, and shapes. From them come cross-references for larger works, in which different grids are combined in several layers, merge with each other, overlap or cover each other. This can be imagined like different stages of a painting process, in which the starting point is always the grid and in individual stages further layers are realized. Works can therefore be finished at several points in time. My desire is to contrast, on the one hand, works that have very few different parameters with works that are very dense in detail.

LS: Now we've looked at your groups of works a little more closely. We haven't talked about one particularity yet. Among them, there are works that were created on a transparent image carrier, such as Plexiglas or foils. That's quite interesting because it gives you the opportunity to paint on the front and back of the bases. How did you come to this step and what potential does it hold for you?

VK: For me, it's about the reflection of digital images: They shield themselves behind the glass of the display and are characterized by a lack of materiality. All you touch is actually your own grease from your fingers, which spreads across the glass. For me, the choice of the transparent image carrier was a way of using spray paint, lacquer paint or acrylic markers to give a materiality to images that have an associative proximity to digital images. In some cases, I play on the front and back, so that there are interactions there between a foreground and a background.

LS: Does this engagement with and reflection on images and materialities of digital images make your painting contemporary? Is that the great quality of your work, to address or comment on contemporary phenomena like screens and digital worlds?

VK: I think it is precisely this proximity of a grid to the pixels of a screen that brings these images close to digital images, regardless of whether they are on canvas or a transparent image carrier. The dissolving of handwriting can also be reminiscent of these clean, sharp-edged images of displays, as can the orientation to horizontal or vertical lines. Displays are also divided into different images or layers, but they are not totally flat on top of each other.

LS: What role does color play in terms of hues?

VK: That's a very difficult question to answer, because for me color is something self-referential. Colors don't mean anything, they stand for themselves. Color is a phenomenon that I find incredibly difficult to grasp and that moves outside of linguistic designation.

LS: With spray paint you are limited in the choice of shades. It's a paint whose properties you can't determine or control yourself: You can't change the consistency, nor can you act on the hue. This sounds very far from classical painting. You turn the experimental setup of paint on white canvas upside down when you work from a black background. Your handling of materials seems rather unconventional as a result.

VK: It connects to the idea of a dissolution of one's own preferences. By using, as you said, a limited color palette that has already been determined by someone in the factory, I am again giving something that I don't determine, but that comes from the outside. I am the one who arranges things.

LS: Contemporary painting is often accused of being self-absorbed, of revolving only around itself and of being disconnected from the social and political challenges of the present. What makes painting interesting for you today? Is it able to comment on the present and make statements?

VK: I have also encountered criticism that painting is already dead in a sense. But I think that precisely because we have integrated more and more digital devices into our everyday lives in the last ten years and are dependent on them, the medium of image is becoming more and more present. In the interaction with painting, I find that it remains a contemporary medium as a result. To examine the extent to which it is possible to be political with abstract painting in particular, I also find a very exciting, but also incredibly difficult question to answer. I can only speak for myself that I don't really feel the need to make a political statement and would actually like, even if it perhaps ties in a little with the self-indulgence of painting, that I step back with painting and actually say nothing at all. The medium of the image, which has now changed so much, I would like to detach more from having to achieve a certain purpose of an image or statement.