Kit Schluter

Bóca presents the exhibition Plenilunio by Kit Schluter.

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

William Blake

Kit tells me he comes to the canvas to escape language. If we look at the work and wonder what intention the artist has we might not immediately jump to “escaping language”. We might instead try to grasp at the forms that appear on the surface so that we may make them intelligible to us. But as we try to assign them meaning or relate them to the world we live in, they signify differently for each of us, something like a Rohrschach test. In that sense, I suspect Kit doesn't set out to describe the things we might allow ourselves to see in his work. His intention seems located elsewhere, maybe even somewhere he doesn’t quite know how to articulate in terms other than ink on canvas, the way the work comes out. There is something about the spontaneity of constructing thought pictorially that offers something new for the artist to explore and for the viewer to subsequently experience. Kit’s mind begins to think with his hand as he starts to paint: being improvisational, it responds presently to a new set of concerns that answer questions he is at once articulating within the work itself. The work has its own interior logic, and to see these paintings is to see the mind of an artist stitching together energetic tensions between his marks.

At first glance you might think of these paintings as photographic. But looking more closely, you realize they couldn't be in this world, and suddenly their materiality becomes evident. Kit is a painter of contrasts. The black and white, the light and dark; his act of composition and the resulting image that occurs. In his paintings darkness is insistence. The unprimed canvas resists the black ink he scrupulously works into it, pushing it against a rugged and stubborn surface that refuses to yield to that darkness. The blank unprimed canvas is therefore not the absence of paint, but the presence of light. His forms are bent on existing against the very surface that tries to reject them. The texture of the work celebrates that surface—its ruggedness is what gives the paintings a sensorial quality that can only come from such a struggle.

The work has been insisted upon. Whatever landscape you might see–be it Hell from a distance or skin under a magnifying glass—speaks to an emotional core the work holds at its center that is as open as the maker was at the time it was conceived. In his flight from language Kit has found a nonverbal poetry, turning himself into an instrument through which forces insist on expressing their form on the canvas. And the result is thrilling to look at.

— Ana Segovia