Thomas Kiaer at DCA
Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Michael Amy
Thomas Kiaer's pictures, combining silkscreen and freewheeling brushwork, are indebted to Robert Rauschenberg. Like Rauschenberg, the Danish Kiaer gains considerable mileage from seemingly antithetical approaches to image making, one photographically based and figurative, the other predominantly abstract. Kiaer's adaptation of the older master's signature style comes across as an act of homage, as he uses it quite successfully.
To produce his works, Kiaer screenprints one or more photographic images, sometimes a single one repeated, onto the can vas, overlaying them with acrylic washes of various densities. The land- or cityscapes in the blown-up photos introduce varying degrees of spatial recession, the depth depending on the scenes. This illusionism is contradicted by brushwork highlighting the front picture plane or establishing ambiguous layers of space lying beyond. Kiaer's idiosyncratic palette is filled with strong tonal contrasts, which add to the push-pull effect. Beyond placing veils of paint over his grainy images, he also draws with the brush, picking up a motif in the photograph and painting around it or creating autonomous forms that animate the surrounding ambience.
Outskirts (2002) consists of at least six blown-up black-and-white photo images of desolate scenes that fill almost the entire height of the vertical canvas. Kiaer's obvious pleasure in the expressive messiness of Warhol and Polke is evidenced in the "poor" printing of the images, with their awkward overlaps and outsize raster dots. A large horizontal swath of yellow topped by mauve provides a powerful accent just under the middle of the picture. It is partly overlapped by three pink medium-size silkscreen images of a statue of Victory on top of a column. White and blue spheres of varying sizes, some resembling large, all-seeing eyeballs, hover around the center.
A patchwork of screenprinted photographs serves as a ground for the magical Untitled, light (2003). On the surface, white scrims of paint achieve a silvery quality against the light and dark beneath them. Dark purple fills the lower right corner, functioning as a repoussoir, and yellow and blue spheres drift across the bottom half.
Mixing mediums in this way requires a tight balancing act. Some paintings appear somewhat congested, others a bit thin. Kiaer succeeds by evoking different moods, varying the colors and brushwork that he plays off against otherwise rather lifeless photographs.
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