Pilar Corrias is happy to current Fireflies Underneath Fever Sky, a solo exhibition of recent work by Pierre Knop. For his first solo present with the gallery, Knop plunges the viewer into kaleidoscopic landscapes – lush forests, imposing mountain ranges, chocolate-box village scenes and dramatic seascapes – that unsettle as a lot as they seduce.
Knop’s method begins with private archives: intimate fragments of images, artwork historical past and fleeting visible reminiscence turn out to be the muse for expansive, surreal vistas that stretch the bounds of creativeness. Referencing a various vary of artists, from Nicolas Poussin or Caspar David Friedrich to Pierre Bonnard, in addition to modern images, Knop extends the custom of European panorama portray. For Knop, the historic weight of the style presents a singular playground through which many modes of portray, reminiscent of Surrealism or the color fields of Summary Expressionism, might be examined alongside modern notions of the pure world.
The artist uniquely deploys color and materials (oil paint, pastel, ink and pencil) to alienate the acquainted, to confound what we expect we all know. Utilizing a feverish color palette, a present of electrical energy runs by way of Knop’s bucolic scenes. The forest cover, forged in indigo blue, stretches out throughout scarlet-red skies; plantlife glows unnaturally amid the undergrowth. The hallucinatory impact is just like that of the after-image, the visible sensation that continues after a short publicity to an intensely vibrant stimulus. Moreover, the proliferation of strategies – impasto meets delicate linework and leaky swimming pools of color – amplifies the sense of polyphony, tuning into what the artist describes because the very important hum beneath the floor of all residing beings.
In Knop’s worlds, the panorama is much less an idyll than it’s a stage for an impending occasion. The suns and moons that preside over his skies like portents allude to a foreboding undercurrent of hidden disturbances, ready within the close to distance. Nonetheless, in a number of compositions small human figures pause in a second of reflection, savouring their escape from the rat race and the chaos of city life. In Fireflies Underneath Fever Sky a finely-tuned affective register is at work, the place the serene and the menacing, the jarring and the smooth, sit aspect by aspect. The rampant vegetation that grows in these lands stands as a lot for nature’s bounty because it does the tangle of emotional and psychological states that subjectivity requires us to seek out our manner by way of.
