Kai Althoff, Untitled

Pregnant with implicit.mes aning but eluding direct interpretation and intelligibility, Kai Althoff’s Untitled from 2008 is a phenomenal example of the artist’s coveted paintings that conjure the intricate machinations of an intensely poetic and sensitive mind. As the four figures enact a mysterious, nonlinear narrative, Untitled possesses an ineffably theatrical quality, as though the characters were performing a play. A polymath working across media including music, installations, sculpture, video, and more, Althoff’s visual language is celebrated for its delicate and evocative conjuring of mysterious characters in ambiguous narratives – paintings that resist classification and interpretation. In their mystique, Althoff’s paintings reward close inspection and entice an intimate and personal response from the viewer. Test.mes nt to Althoff’s singular and critically acclaimed practice, he has been the subject of major retrospectives such as Kai Althoff: and then leave me to the common swifts (und dann überlasst mich den Mauerseglern) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Kai Althoff goes with Bernard Leach at the Whitechapel Gallery, and Kai Althoff: Kai kein Respekt (Kai no respect) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. He also has found his work in prominent institutional collects ions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In the present work, four figures are dispersed throughout the canvas, exchanging knowing smirks and smiles. Two of them are holding (or in one case dropping) sheets of paper with marks that read as text but disintegrate upon close inspection into indecipherable marks, hinting at the fluctuation between claritys and indecipherability inherent to the present work. A pair of legs in the top left corner suggests the presence of a fifth figure leaving the scene, but close inspection implies that he may just be an image on a flattened surface, hinted at by the pattern of wooden planks sketched into the background. In the lower right corner, we see a restrained Black figure, clad in a white robe, a broken plank from the wooden box that encloses him in hand. His jutting, spindly limbs defy anatomy, conjuring an aura of eeriness, further accentuated by his thousand-yard stare. Throughout the composition, broad and bold lines traverse the canvas and demand our attention, like the spread-out leg and bent plank that draw the eye to the bottom edge, or the orange and yellow fields of color that segment the picture plane into distinct quadrants. Our attention, after being strung along to all corners of the canvas, returns to the remaining three people, completely unaware—or in resolute denial—of both the viewer and the entrapped figure.

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Teetering on the edge of intelligibility, Untitled and its allusion-rich narrative opens a gateway into Althoff’s magical, dreamlike world. However, as Diedrich Diederichsen explains, “there is always a darker side to Althoff’s language, a looming threat of violence—here, a face distorted into a grimace; there, a menacing gesture.” (Diedrich Diederichsen, “Kai Althoff,” Artforum, Vol. 5, No. 5 January 2017 (online)) Perhaps the three figures, with their expressive gestures and sheets of paper in hand, are discussing a painting hung in the background. Then the threat comes in the form of a gaping chasm in the painting’s narrative; three figures discussing the work ignore what may be its subject, trapped in a box, limbs contorted and shackled. Could this chilling image that Althoff paints be understood in the context of his scorn for artistic establishments, and their intellectualization and analytical approach that attempts to decipher artworks through critical theory? In his interview with Laura Hoptman, then curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Althoff proclaimed: “I do listen to others’ ideas of what my things may be or not, or what others think in general, but I am not very interested in what you have to say to them. You speak of yourself as US. Who is this? It sounds like a school teacher’s approach, or a spokesman of a school, who will be tolerant and take pride in it, but at one point will eventually defend the school’s statutes one swore to be loyal to—when something becomes too obstinate or nonsensical. As if things have to make sense, or I would strive to do things that make sense to you or them.” (the artist quoted in: “Kai Althoff in Conversation with Laura Hoptman” in: Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Kai Althoff: and then leave me to the common swifts, 2016, p. 71) Perhaps in this work Althoff preempts this sent.mes nt, resisting the exacting yardstick of analysis and setting up the viewer for a raw encounter with the sinister myopia of interpretive reasoning.

However, as with most of Althoff’s works, Untitled does not limit itself to a single interpretation. The discrete sections of the painting imply a narrative, read anticlockwise from bottom left to top left. Is this rather one of Althoff’s provocations, presenting an discomforting story in which the three Black figures and two white are in fact repeated characters, and we are privy to a narrative which shows an initial, almost violent interaction, where the woman snatches the papers out of the reader’s hand, then second those same two figures, the woman crouched harpie-like atop a box in which the Black figure is chained but in the process of breaking out, and thirdly and finally his escape in the upper left? Or does it feature a more surreal story with a supernatural figure, dominating the center of the canvas with an almost witch-like presence, in an eye-grabbings dress and thick, almost green-ish makeup, laying bare their true identity as seen in the figure in the upper right? Untitled may even be telling a more autobiographical perspective, as the bespectacled figure stands in for Althoff in his presentation of his own creative work—whether it be the “painting” behind him or the text he has in hand—feeling oppressed and shackled by the analytical critique of the two blonde figures. These myriad readings are innate to Althoff’s paintings; in their fantastical narratives, paintings like Untitled entice the viewer to impose an interpretation, only to never settle on a satisfying conclusion, to branch out further into countless readings of the human condition.

Synthesizing moments of history, Germanic folk tradition, religious iconography, counter-cultural movements, and art historical precedent, Althoff’s paintings present a unique visual experience. His attenuated linework, vibrant colors, and dynamic manipulation of pictorial space evoke the Expressionist styles of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the psychological portraits of Emil Nolde, or the contorted forms of Egon Schiele. Althoff constructs his own semiotic system, its evocative narratives sustained by references that are both arcane and quotidian, both deeply personal and universal. In the words of Nicholas Baume, Althoff explores “the manifold possibilities of human subjectivity and the complex range of emotions, responses, and beliefs that enable life to go on, even under great duress. Althoff's literary imagination does more than describe its protagonists; it inhabits the characters he creates. Their visual rendering is a form of enactment through which their stories are allowed to unfold." (Nicholas Baume in: Exh. Cat., Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Kai kein Respekt, 2004, pp. 33-4) Suffused with both beauty and violence, the familiar and the sinister, the present work distills the impenetrable mystery and beguiling narrative of Althoff’s visual lexicon into what is perhaps a moment of personal, spiritual escape.

However, as Joshua Mack has suggested: “Style, content and sources are less clues to the meaning of the work… than they are annotations or entries in what must be understood as an autobiography told by and through the material production and collects ed souvenirs of Althoff’s mind… It is just stuff until either the artist or his audience makes connections between it.” (Joshua Mack, “Kai Althoff: and then leave me to the common swifts (und dann überlasst mich den Mauerseglern), ArtReview, 9 January 2017 (online)) In Untitled, Althoff creates a work rich in allegory and emotion, scattered with thrilling ambiguities left gloriously unexplained.

Artist

Kai Althoff