Knoebel & Casentini

Another reader of this conversation, a painter, (I'm not sure if people want to be outed as a reader without their permission), wrote to me about Imi Knoebel. This painter, first initial "K", is a different reader than the person, a non-painter, who wrote to me about Schur and Wilson. So we know we've got at least two readers.

And Vincent Romaniello, who said some nice things about both of us (let me just take this opportunity to say, "Hello Vince," and to put in a plug for everyone to go on over and look at Vince's paintings), is reading this. So we have at least three readers.

And there is a fourth person, another painter, first initial "J",who also let me me know s/he is a reader via email, so for now won't be identified. So we have four readers.

Oh, and there is also someone else, another art weblogger, a painter with the first initial "D". So there, we're up to at least five known readers. We're doing our market research here.

You, out there reading this. Send me an email. If you're really fast you can be our sixth known reader.

So anyway, back to Imi Knoebel. As far as I know, he's not reading our conversation here. But he should. His ears must be burning. I whisper, "Hier Imi... Imi, hergekommen... ja, ja, es ist gut, wir ist gerechte Unterhaltung. Du kannst unser 7. Leser sein "

Actually, I know very little about Imi Knoebel's work. Sure, I've seen reproductions, I know of the work, I know who he is, I know of his relationship to Blinky Palermo and Beuys, I know that he's widely exhibited, but I don't feel like I know his work in any depth so that I can talk about it. Our reader "K" does, has seen plenty of the work in Europe, and endorses it a great deal. I believe I've only seen one print in person. You can find plenty of images of recent work on the web, but I just don't know very much about it. And from reproductions I like the loose constructions from the 80's, like the one above, and the Messerschnitte collages.

Back in 2003 I was in touch with someone who had been an art handler in NY in the late 80's and who had seen Blinky Palermo's To the People of New York City (1976–77) when it was first installed at Dia. The art handler wrote to me about what he had heard about The Unexpected Death of Blinky Palermo in the Tropics, "He (Palermo) made great work and disappeared. Imi Knoebel is another favorite, and seems to invoke the life of Palermo as if he were making the works Blinky would make if he were still alive." I don't know if that's fair to say or not. (You can read more of what he wrote on my old weblog, but that weblog is going to disappear in a few weeks. Poof! Gone.)

You wrote in your Miami report, "At Nachst St. Stephan booth, Imi Knoebel’s supersize paintings of pure color on thin sheets of plywood—geometric abstraction, color field painting and relief sculpture all rolled (flattened, actually) into one." That sounds good. The color, geometry, and regular measurement of his work actually make me think of some of my own HTML stuff.

So I'm hoping that between you and Reader #2 "K", and perhaps some of my own research, I can learn a little more about what is interesting about Knoebel's art.

Top: Imi Knoebel, Großes Doppelkreuz, 1985, 345 x 242 cm, Acryl auf Holz, rückseitig signier (URL)

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As for Casentini, I'll simply say that his 2004 show at Brian Gross in SF did not impress me. I'm refreshing my memory from an email I wrote to another artist dated April 13, 2004 (neat to have an archive to draw from):

"The lighting wasn't so great I thought in the gallery- kind of harsh, showed imperfections across some of the surfaces and at the edges that, given the way the paintings are made, seemed out of place. No way could I have known from pix on gallery web site that he was contrasting thin vs. built-up areas, and matte vs. shinier surfaces. That didn't work so well for me.

And I was trying to understand the purpose for planes to wrap around the sides of the canvas, as if the planes on the front that continued around to the side were portions of a 3-D block embedded in the canvas- do you know what I mean, that he was making the canvas an object but also some of the planes on the front of the canvas began to feel like 3-D rectangles because they wrapped around the edges to the side? That and the consistently close valued, muted colors just didn't come alive for me."

What I meant was that there was the attempt to make illusion that the paintings appear to be made up of blocks, somewhat like Carlos Estrada-Vega's blocks. But Casentini's didn't work. I hated the surfaces. I thought the matte/shiny contrasts were kind of cheezy. And in each painting he was working with a consistently closed-value, close-hue palette. I didn't like the work at all.

I used Casentini to further illustrate the difference between Wilson and Schur. Out of the three of those artists, I like Schur's work the most. I like the shaky improvisation of the paintings, the bleeding wacky edges, the intense and lush acrylic, the less predictable spaces, the way the blocks align but don't lock, and how these alignments shift in small fields allover the painting. He keeps the painting flat, has a good overall plane. Wilson is more dependent on a kind of regularity and measure. Casentini is more classically composing space.