Per Dolorem ad Lucem

Space — the interior between surfaces, skins, and shells — is diffuse, often repressed, inaccessible. The inside of one’s own body in everyday life, in health so concealed, so foreign; on a small scale an infinite vastness, yet so difficult to comprehend. The joint exhibition Per Dolorem ad Lucem by Kurt von Bley and Reinert Keuter at Nizza, Berlin, circles such an in-between space of interior and exterior, of transformation — through pain toward light. Kurt von Bley presents excerpts from a series spanning the last fifteen years, within which he transfers tablets, antidepressants, antiretroviral drugs, and other pharmaceutical preparations into strictly composed pictorial fields in various arrangements. In ready-mades, colorful pills are examined for their aesthetic and conceptual potential between the honeycombs of used filters or as part of collage-like paintings. As objects, as materials — industrially manufactured, produced millions of times, functionally determined. At the same time, they carry a personal dimension and, through the recurring work title Selfportrait, are often autobiographically connoted. The tablets open up a space of possibility tied to concrete lived realities: therapy, stabilization, endurance — and relapse. At the same time, the serial arrangement evokes a peculiar calm; fields of tablets recall diagrams, Minimal Art, or sacred ornamentation. Order emerges, control becomes visible, yet it remains perceptible that this order is fragile and in its double movement, oscillates around an unsettling intermediate space. In Reinert Keuter’s series Cut, lacquered polyester fabric is stretched in a laborious process over large-scale stretcher frames or sculptural constructions of wood and metal. The yellowish-brown surfaces recall an organic-technical skin and bulge in a kind of freeze, as if subjected to invisible pressure. In some works, simple objects are wedged beneath the surfaces, intensifying the impression of a foreign object under the skin that, like the foot of a fetus in the womb, pushes from inside outward yet remains bound. Lines appear like cuts or scars, and thus Keuter’s works also bear biographical traces and engage with the body — its vulnerability as well as its resilience. In terms of art history, a central motif of the surface as skin is correspondingly touched upon; for the stretched canvas was never merely a support for an image, but always also a membrane between inside and outside, body and pictorial space. In Keuter’s work it becomes a physical boundary, and an image forms itself. The fold, since Baroque sculpture a site of heightened vitality, appears less as drapery than as tension and volume, as a generated form. Reinert Keuter and Kurt von Bley thus converge in a shared movement — how can the interior be shown without explaining it, for it cannot be explained.