Kamil Kukla: Ratio Decay

23. June - 30 July 2016.

Opening: 23. June 2016., 7.p.m.

Program of the vernissage: two soundscapes of Kamil Kukla, performed by the artist

Knoll Galeria Budapest is pleased to announce Kamil Kuklas (*1989, lives and works in Krakow) first solo show in the gallery. 

Kamil Kukla’s succinct abstract works can be named classical painting. Painting that opposes its own over decades newly compiled obituary, a young and vivid existence of the genre. Something is coming back in Kukla’s works which often was missed or even avoided in painting of the younger generation: a fresh and ambitious involvement with the techniques and genres of the old masters. 

Kamil Kukla realizes his paintings based on the parameters of the classical panel painting: composition, light, colours, surface, shapes, lines. He combines freely fine and scrawly brush strokes with voluminous dark-bright bodies of color and single passages with dynamic color gradients, which whiz like volatile insects over the painting leaving their traces. The backgrounds are mostly monochrom or show smooth color gradients. Kuklas abstract color- and shape-conglomerates float in an undefined space, similar to the known Dutch still lifes which e.g. show a segment of a table or a room without further detailed location. Repeatedly the viewer believes to grasp something specific in Kuklas paintings - wild vegetation, fragments of animal bodies, strange deep-water organisms, bubbling geysers or unknown flora. In Kuklas works quiet and contemplation never dominate because the viewer isn’t able to perceive one center of action. His attention is being chased over the painting, from carefully modeled bodies of colour to abstract, gestural brush strokes, into the depths of a color gradient and back again towards fragments of organic life which one believes to see. Kukla conducts all elements by drawing on old master’s techniques and expressions of abstract painting which he combines. His visual language shows an invigorating approach on the possibilities of abstract painting today.  

Kamil Kuklas exhibition title "Decay Ratio" originats from the term in audio engineering: in audio programs it is possible to adjust several parameters, f. e. echo or reverb effects, like decay time. On the other hand it refers on  biological processes, from the artists high interest in. Complex mechanisms that the human being tries to explain and illustrate, whereas often an abstracting description or depiction is used as a mediating tool. Evolution and demise of diverse species, forms of life from different geological eras, the impressive diversity of life and its context-specific depiction or ones own subjective positioning within our surrounding macro- and microcosms - this are some of the topics that Kamil Kukla concentrates in his paintings. During the various geological eras of the planet, environment faced stages with exploding life and stages with the extinction of whole species.

What offers the Anthropocene? Painting in any case; and music - as Kamil Kuklas self-composed, spheric sounds show. 

Thank you for the Polish Istitute in Budapest, for the help at realisation of the music-program.