A Party for Boris
Stefan Kraus
17 May – 5 July 2008

* view images | text in Italian *

 

This is the first solo show for Stefan Kraus, who favours the drawing as initial language within his work. It is the medium which most promptly responds to immediacy, a space apparently incorruptible, where the line can exactly remain what it is.

 

Stefan Kraus’s drawings are even more surprising since they can be corrupted: the artist can transform them into objects, and he can bring these objects back into two-dimensional space. This dual nature seems to be a necessary condition for Kraus’s entire body of work, where the border between the real and the non-real is broken, and the archetype becomes an almost tangible presence.

  

With an unusual appetite for visual semiotics, Stefan Kraus seems, in a very specific sense, an iconophile. Interested in the sublime nature of things and using a highly personal ontological vocabulary fed by several pre-conceptions about reality (“the space within my drawings is as real as the space we call reality”), the artist distills a visual alchemy for moments of metaphysical anxiety.

 

In the context of his works (either drawing, painting, sculpture or performance), the title of the exhibition “A Party for Boris”, inspired by the homonymous theatrical play by the controversial Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, can be understood as the pretext for an episode of exorcism: in the sense of relieving the absurd, the exaggeration, the negation and the dialogue with death. The space created by Kraus, inscribed within Thomas Bernhard’s colossal umbrella, opens up a dialectic of salvation: the works are silently conciliating and inviting the spectator to a poetic, introspective approach.

 

Stefan Kraus takes a fictitious initiatory route: from the performance of “The Sleeping Soldier” (which descends from a Christian metaphor), to the paintings and archetypal drawings, to the sculptural object ‘arches’. We are in a locus amoenus, where emotions, cultural symbols and inner visions of reality seen as mental projections are interwoven. Nothing ostentatious or explicit; instead, a deeply intellectual attitude that interrogates the symbolic nature of things and at the same time instigates revelation.

Text by Daria Pervain


Stefan Kraus