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| Woodstock Times |
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| Koschetzki at City Lights |
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Richard Pantell's intimate
and delightful City
Lights Gallery brought a new clarity and seriousness
to presentation of visual art for sale in the
village for a few months, and considerable
lamentation has been heard that it
is closing in two weeks. The final exhibit opens
this Saturday, a life-retrospective of the diverse
media of Koschetzki, ceramist and
painter, who has taught here a few years. For
the first time, both rooms of the space will
be used for exhibition. |
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Koschetzki (as he prefers to be known as an artist) was educated technically in three mid- and south-western institutions, and is also trained in bronze-casting. German by birth, he came to this country as a child; part of his youth was spent in the elegant Palen-ville house of the long-lived eminent painter, Everett Shinn, one of the Ashcan Group. Koschetzki's taste in images is unique to him, formed from his own experiences of art, some of it entirely outside the limits of "fine" art. But they are transmuted by his personal imagination, earnestness, fantasy. A fundamental and urgent personal mysticism informs almost everything he makes, giving to some images, even the most apparently conventional ones from pop culture (used without irony, by the way), a weird intensity, occasionally approaching the hallucinatory and/or demonic (the skull-under-the-skin sort of vision). |
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This
visionary quality is most clear in his porcelain
dragons. Hardly a form one expects to
find made by a serious artist, or to have any
sort of originality or intensity of expression, even in those countries where the dragon is part of active
folklore, they are based on the
sort of ceramic figures sold in Chinatown. But
the specific forms are Koschetzki's own; indeed
they approach abstraction based on dragons.
The technique is highly original and awesome,
and the spirituality of the dragon concept
(bird-serpent, spirit of heaven crossed
with that of earth, et al.) is remarkably
incarnated. The largest dragon in the show
is a solid hunk of porcelain weighing perhaps forty
pounds. (Porcelain is difficult to create except in
thinnish walls.) |
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Koschetzki also makes abstract sculpture of terra cotta, far-out arrays of spiral-grooved long-loaf or cane forms, perhaps phallic (this idea distressed the artist). They spring off from a solid ball of clay atop massy rectangular blocks of clay as pedestals are built solid, hollowed out, fired, repaired at the inevitable cracks, and lined inside with industrial epoxy. |
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The
exhibit includes a dozen or so paintings,
some up to eight feet high, and two series of three
are among them. They are painted
in thinned acrylic by glazing, a term and
technique not elsewhere used with acrylic to my knowledge. Acrylic is opaque and flat-tish
like poster paint, so one does not expect nor
get any kind of translucency (such as is the purpose
of using it with oils); but Koschetzki does
get a sort of emphatic, deep, unequivocally
rich color, odd-looking, which accords with
the strangeness of his pictures. |
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Most
of the paintings look pre-planned as they
are line-based with areas of flat color within
hard edges—a design look. The artist does
not make preliminary sketches however, and the
pictures evolve greatly during development,
which may proceed for over four months
(during which time he meticulously records
hours spent on it). Koschetzki thinks of
himself as communing with his subconscious
while he works, and some elements of
his pictures are mysteries to him; for instance, several white discs in skies. (Another instance is
"Cool hope and the chaining of Bullebach,"
which includes a subterranean devil-like figure who
appeared during the painting process, and even revealed his name to
the painter.) |
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The most arresting are four paintings which use his wife as model, a strikingly beautiful woman with reddish hair, a sweet smile and a look of cool sensuality. In a triptych, she is cast in surrealistic allegorical encounters with graphic representations of what I suppose to be life-force lust, yin/yang interactions, communing with fantasy beasts in the
sky. In another, "Laurel," we see her suspended nude but for a diaphanous drape in a lounging pose in mid-air, resembling a more ethereal countess than Goya was interested in. She is dropping a rose from her hand. |
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The landscapes in these paintings have big skies, where most of the action takes place; in some, complex repetitive designs of lines (like computer graphics) are painted (meaning unknown to the artist). |
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Some large plants are revealed with schematic root systems in the underground emphatic. Several landscapes have the north profile of Overlook Mountain as a (deliberate) earthly spiritual anchor. |
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Koschetzki
is interested in paint as a means of
communication, and is seldom indulged for itself, as a
liquid paste which can remember
how it was laid out. |
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A few paintings are more
conventional still-lifes
or landscapes. (One shows a goldfish-like
hummingbird-like creature poised before
flowers.) But generally these lack
the autobiographical fascination of the more imaginative scenes with implied narratives. The one which
is most involving is actually
autobiographical in origin: |
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"Our
Farm"
is a memorial depiction of several animals
the artist loved enough to move from Illinois to
Saugerties, with a little house he built
for some of them. Koschetzki is a visionary
artist such as were Blake (but without an
explicated theology), Chagall, Fuseli, Dali (in the allegorical paintings of his wife). His images have a look
of uncontrived, unself-conscious
naivete or innocence, although they are obviously the
work of a trained and intelligent
artist. He "looks into his
heart and paints"
(a phrase nowadays invoked only to say that in
the modernist period, so selfconsciously
intellectual, it's impossible to do.) Anything
suggesting impulses to com-merciality,
mode-mongering or meretricious-ness
is absent absolutely. Koschetzki is one of those
quintessential, self-reliant loner/ originators
("pioneers," they are called in some
endeavors) who make their own art and worlds,
and ignore, even if aware of, what other people do or
think. More than in any other culture in history, this is not uncommon in this country;
and ultimately it is a mainspring of the diversity,
depth, self-reliance and
dynamic of our arts. |
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Jurgen
Alfred Koschetzki is an inventive technician, expert
in ceramic-kiln building and
all aspects of ceramic arts, and has taught at
a half-dozen universities and other schools.
— Tram Combs |
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KOSCHETZKI: Painting and sculpture.
City Lights
Gallery, 5 Rock City Road. August 22-30, 1987 (reception August 22, 4-6 pm). Hours: Noon-9
pm Fri.-Sun. |
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