Daily Rhythms
Vortic Art
Geran Knol
May - June 2022
In 1962, conceptual artist George Brecht proposed one of his famous musical scores. Titled “3 Piano Pieces,” it consisted of three everyday actions: standing, sitting, and walking. When I first encountered the work of Geran Knol (b. 1991, Netherlands), I thought this minimal conceptual score perfectly encapsulated much of his proposals.
The characters in Knol’s paintings and drawings, which act as alter egos in a shifting world, perform these three actions in various series, as if reinterpreting Brecht’s piano pieces from a new visual paradigm. At times, his elongated male figures stand, always in profile, blending their outlines with the background and gradually camouflaging into it. At other times, as seen in the previous series “Sitting Men,” they remain seated on imaginative chairs, merging their bodies with clouds of smoke, vegetation, steps, and other elements.
In this exhibition titled “Daily Rhythms,” featuring a curated selection of works on paper and linen, Knol presents a new composition of figures walking across staves of linear textures. The line is a fundamental aspect of these works: it outlines the contours of the moving body, interweaves the multidirectional background, and combines with equal intensity in geometric and organic patterns. For example, in “A New Headscape” (2022), a faceless figure with long legs progresses through a landscape revealing two distant trees. Each step seems to generate a new wave of curved lines around it. In contrast, diagonals dominate in “Linear Exercise IV” (2022), conveying a sense of direction, rhythm, and speed. The canvases play with a reduced palette that does not detract from the figures. On the contrary, they always manage to emerge from the serene textures and colors, continuing their silent journey.
In a way, walking as art has always been related to the line… "Draw a straight line and follow it," said another conceptual piece by La Monte Young in the sixties.[1] This is precisely what Knol is doing in these recent works based on notions of landscape, body, journey, and perception, produced during his residency at L21 in Mallorca: following a line of inquiry without being entirely sure where it will lead, continuing to advance, just like his characters, one foot in front of the other, opening up to the contingencies of the creative process.
[1] “Composition #10” (1960).