Anyone who opens a magic box never quite knows what will emerge. Almost three years after his last solo exhibition at Pretty Portal, Roman Klonek opens his and conjures up a wonderful collection of new works.
Dreamlike Worlds
Roman Klonek's images draw us into intoxicating, dreamlike worlds in which he tells stories of fabulous creatures and anthropomorphic figures. His narratives lead us into fluffy, absurd landscapes and fill us with joyful astonishment time and again. Text elements in scripts that are unfamiliar to most of us, which Roman tongue-in-cheek calls "weirdness amplifiers", round off his compositions.
The Art of the Woodcut
But it is not only Roman's visual worlds that are something special. The woodcut process he uses to create his works also stands out and invites us to look at them more than once.
The Artist
Born in Katowice, Poland, in 1969, the artist studied visual communication at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf in the early 1990s. He graduated under Harald Fuchs with a series of woodcuts that laid the foundation for his further development. In spirit, he feels connected to artists such as Fyodor Khitruk, Zdeněk Miler, Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami. He has gained experience not only in unconventional character design, but also as founder of the non-profit gallery Revolver in Düsseldorf, as a visiting professor in Mainz and as a lecturer in printmaking at the University of Applied Sciences in Würzburg. Numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany and abroad keep his fingers warm for drawing and carving in his Düsseldorf studio.
Lost in Print
Text by Raiko Oldenettel
What is written remains. Roman Klonek knows this and likes to take notes. That these notes do not consist of words may be a result of his working process. His pool of ideas consists of sketches, small variations of figures and forms, abstractions drawn from cartoons and otherworldly realms. These notes do not look backwards or reminisce; instead, in constant transformation, they are oriented towards the future. So one could say: "Those who sketch, become." But what exactly does the Düsseldorf artist do when he draws every day, reinvents the old and finally elevates a small, select part of it onto the pedestal of paper?
A Narrative in Forms
Klonek was born in Poland in the 1960s and spent his early childhood there. He brought memories of rattling Super 8 cartoons with him to Germany, where classic American cartoons, Czech animated films and Japanese anime and manga shaped his unmistakable style. He chose to study visual communication and, early on, slowed the moving image in his mind down to its printmaking quality. He peels the film still, a recurring term in the vocabulary of his connoisseurs and critics, out of the formal worlds of his notebook. Perhaps this is precisely why he turned to the slowest of media, printmaking, to radicalise this deceleration even further.
Klonek works in woodcut, more precisely in the reduction technique, known in German as the "lost cut". The effort required before his ensembles appear before the viewer, colourful, reduced and alive, is colossal. In contrast to his restlessly changing sketches, he must now think the realisation backwards, because in a reduction woodcut the material is irretrievably lost. First, he transfers the preliminary drawing onto the block. Then, layer by layer, he cuts away the areas that are to remain in the colour already printed. Only the remaining raised surfaces take up the next layer of oil-based ink and transfer contours and fields onto the sheet. As this process is repeated for every colour, he must not only think in mirror image but also never lose sight of a single form. What has been cut away cannot be restored; corrections are hardly possible. Small editions are the result, and thanks to minimal variations, each sheet is essentially unique: a statement at a time when offset printing and digital media dominate visual communication and rely on replicability.
Please Step Closer!
Not only the technique but also the visual worlds themselves appeal to a sense of being lost. As if in a pleasant intoxication, we encounter wild animals, anthropomorphic hybrid creatures and impossible landscapes. With headlines, subtitles and comic-style speech bubbles, he blends bewilderment with the unreality of what we see, as the languages depicted are illegible to most Europeans. Japanese and Russian have particularly captivated him through his travels. He calls the lettering in kanji and Cyrillic script "weirdness amplifiers": weird because they demand constant attention, amplifying because they catalyse irritation. Their sign-like quality underlines the inherent energy of the fabulous creatures and supervillains that lure the audience in with vivid colour and apparent harmlessness.
But once you stand in front of a sheet like "Naruto", which from afar resembles a film poster, and grasp what the creature is actually doing, half bat, quarter human, quarter rubber boot, there can be no more talk of safety. Klonek's narrative form-mutants have teeth. They can be gigantic or tiny, recall forces of nature born in a Petri dish or, as in "Naruto", have brought their own weapons. That many of them seem preoccupied with themselves or their own misfortune is no reason to sound the all-clear. It is simply the result of a sketchbook whose discarded figures make us all the more curious.
Roman Klonek – "Magic Box"
Exhibition
25 February – 1 April
Opening
25 February, 7 pm
Pretty Portal
Brunnenstraße 12
40223 Düsseldorf
