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Entering the LabyrinthAbout Rolf A. Kluenters latest group of
works
Christoph Schaden
The Labyrinth is the home to the hesitant
The way of the one, who is eschewing to
reach his destination
Will easily draw a labyrinth
Walter Benjamin
The logic of an artwork can generally be deduced from a single
physical or spiritual
movement. Since many centuries the portal of the Romanesque
Cathedral of Lucca
is adorned by an artwork in stone, showing a circular labyrinth,
which according to the
accompanying inscription refers to the legend of Theseus. Its
specic form evolves
from a single rotation and spiritual motion, leading from
periphery to centre. As the
famous legend instructs, the way out of the labyrinth, can be
achieved with the thread
of Ariadne, at best. Interpretations of the legend, which serves
as an archetypal model
for the human understanding of the world, all-too often overlook
the location of the
entrance. Access to those archetypal forms of labyrinths, which
can physically be
entered, is only possible from the west, an orientation, which
already for the Celts
signied the direction of death or the otherworld, respectively
underworld. The east onthe other hand constitutes the entre to
insight and renewal, until today. Thus labyrinths
are by no means only symbolic one-way gures, but also concrete
ways of experience,
whose accomplishment includes a specic spatial motion.
Portals of the labyrinth is the title of Rolf A. Kluenters
latest group of works. The
ambiguous title suggests to rst consult a biographical foil, not
only because the
unusual path of life of the artist, who being born in 1956 in
Buervenich near Cologne, is
characterized by a consequent turning to the east. After
graduating from the renowned
Fine Arts Academy in Duesseldorf in the year 1982, Rolf A
Kluenter didnt focus on New
York, which as metropolis of contemporary art had produced a
hypnotic maelstrom, but
rather towards Nepal. For him, the new positioning, which not
only in the physical sensemeant a counter-direction, was like the
entry into the labyrinth of insight. Especially
because his sojourn also included an intensive occupation with
far-eastern ways of
thinking and meditation. Until 1994 he lived and taught in
Kathmandu, after this daring
the move to Shanghai, a metropolis with a capitalistically
characterised dynamic that
constitutes the third station of an unusual artistic path.
Who ventures so far into another direction has something
different, signicant to
communicate. Rolf A. Kluenters dealing with far-eastern
traditions of thought results
in an artistic impulse, which western criteria and terminology
can only inadequately
describe. In Portals of the Labyrinth this impulse is mirrored
by the sensitive leitmotiv
of the colour black, which as allegorical negation seems to be
omnipresent. Already for
Secret Room a group of works developed between 1986 and 2004,
Rolf A. Kluenter
used hand-made paper, which only after the addition of coal dust
adopts a signicant
black dyeing. Resembling a signature the paper material serves
as the dark painting-
base, which in its surface structure, material interwoven
character and graduation of
colour appears multiple facetted and fractured. Thus it
functions like the negative lm of
a not (yet) exposed photograph, whose grain is waiting for the
rst rays of the sun.
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Thus the colour black constitutes the starting point of a
creative process, which literally as well as
metaphorically can be referred to as VIA NEGATIVA. The treatment
of the black surface is effected with
white and black tinctures, which mostly evoke net-like
structures and interweavements, their overlapping
often creating spatial effects. Circle and rectangle, dot and
line serve as formal points of reference in
the coordinate system of artistic query. Positioned in relation
to each other they obviously follow rational
principles only to a limited extent. Instead they are becoming
independent and create various complex
connections. Consequently the dual patterns of cognition, which
principally allow the understanding of the
world, mutate into far more complicated systems. The works
belonging to Portals of the Labyrinth are
fragile and accessible in-between entities, which venture on the
narrow ridge between abstraction andassociation. How open and
subtle these paper-works are conceived cannot only be seen in the
border
areas, which consciously fray or expand into the three-
dimensional.
The viewers associations of these fragile networks with road
maps, computer generated brain waves and
labyrinth-like archetypes, which sometimes appear meandering,
spiralling and atomising themselves, arent
coincidental. In a process of viewing, which in the vocabulary
of perception psychology is termed cognitive
mapping these structures of reception give valuable orientation
points for image recognition. But Rolf A.
Kluenters wall-covering works also include numerous pitfalls as
the titles trap door, phantom exit or
Fruehwarnsystem indicate. Even if melancholy and insight are
conjoined as in the case of Melancholia
meets Soa, it is rather difcult for the insight: The light bulbs
remain switched off.
In numerous aspects Rolf A. Kluenters works mirror an unsettling
act of visual understanding of the world,
amounting to an introspective query. They prove that the entry
into the labyrinth doesnt remain without
consequences. The Hungarian theologian Marcell Mrtoffny once
remarked that nowadays art doesnt need
theology but that instead theology needs art. Who takes a look
at the works of Portals of the Labyrinth will
inevitably agree with him.
Trap doors phantom exits
Early warning systems
Grids all over
Next step, where____
Google me the news
Portals of the labyrinth
Re-check the latitude
Eastern quadrant farthest point
Sequence codes unveiledSophia in retreat
121*2828E
Melancholia ux
