Page 93 - The MoMA/ Guggenheim issue of World of Art magazine (2003)

The Stations of the cross, which the artist has
made for the church of the Madonna Pellegrina,
Padua, have absorbed this profound lesson learnt
from italian art.
Here, the artist provides us with the articulation
of untimely gestures within the classical matrix
of coercive iconography of different reliefs. if the
figural can be recognised in the “composition”,
then this particular gesture is certainly that of
“decomposition”.

for the designer or sculptor, the “scalpel” seems
to be the preferred implement. its line is always
redolent of a scream or pain – either, whether it
cuts across the folds of a fabric or the contours of
a human body. The expressionist “urgrund” of the
artist is not so much an element of his personal
visual culture as a natural option. you become
classical, but you are born an expressionist.
The anatomies the “surgeon” Kruch “operates”
on, usually human anatomies, are the wounds
of terror and anguish. His line (in drawing and
sculpture alike) is perpetually the seismograph
of sedition. When it is not a violent cut within
the page of work, it moves randomly in its search
for the lost whole.

Generally, expressionism incites analogical thought
precisely because the disgregation of form,
“form as the deformation of the Real”, calls (as
compensation) for the exorcism of words. Unlike
the self-sufficiency of “paradise”, the “hell” of
abstract/abstruse artistic morphologies convokes
critical discourse as a form of propitiatory magic.
The cultural equivalent of magic in the modern
age and the acto of critical conscience.
nikolaus-otto kruch
homoCane
This type of art might well evoke a sort of 2000 Bronze
analogical delirium. h.28 x w.5 x d.9 cm.
h.11 x w.2 x d.3½ in.
i will not allow myself to be reined into this
delirium precisely because the image is pure
witness. it is the deposition of he who has sat
before the scene of a drama. But where the artist
himself is the very scene of that drama.

WORLD of ART 91