air supremacy

Karin Krommes

December 15, 2012 — January 27, 2013
Triumph gallery

Karin Krommes' painting looks unusual among her native aspens. To begin with, it takes a lot of effort just to realize that this is painting. The goal-setting crisis overtakes the viewer of Krommes’s paintings, which are too realistic for painting: the result does not correspond to the technique in which one is accustomed to look for the physicality of living paint, the expression of a gesture mutating into a sign. The material and expression, all this physics and lyrics of the painting, mean more to the connoisseur of painting than the subject of the image. In the case of Krommes, this analytical approach is not suitable.

Krommes' uncritical, sensual perception of painting also runs into an obstacle. This is due to the specific history of Russian art. Hyperrealism has never been a stylistic lure for either the Soviet or the Russian artist. The outlines of the national artistic space up to the 80s were determined by the long process of disintegration of the "harsh style", a steep mixture of French Impressionism and the monumental genre. In addition, the subject world seemed to have turned its back on the consumer for several decades.

Dance
2012
Canvas, acrylic, oil
150 × 210 cm

Krommes' uncritical, sensual perception of painting also runs into an obstacle. This is due to the specific history of Russian art. Hyperrealism has never been a stylistic lure for either the Soviet or the Russian artist. The outlines of the national artistic space up to the 80s were determined by the long process of disintegration of the "harsh style", a steep mixture of French Impressionism and the monumental genre. In addition, the subject world seemed to have turned its back on the consumer for several decades.

The place of the Western juvenile cult of the new and bright, or renewal, was occupied by the senile cult of reuse, or hoarding. Warhol’s "Golden Marilyn" and Rabin’s "Garbage Dump No. 8" are the same age as Madonna and Pugacheva. And due to the peculiarities of national optics, to look for a "second bottom" in everything (this term itself is from the spy lexicon), an image approaching photographic accuracy and devoid of signs of authorial expression is considered insignificant, unreal and thrown out of the sphere of attention. Only surreal connotations can keep it within the language of description.

The necrosphere is ready to forget, states Krommes, that the impulse to live was given to it by man. Aircraft engines, whose portraits are lovingly painted by Karin Krommes, have found their habitat. The sky, which humanity has always endowed with the qualities of an ideal existence, is already occupied. In the air, among flying creatures, to which man also denies reason, their superiority is undeniable.