| YORK DER KNOEFEL "WYSIWYG 2007"
In his new artistic work, Knoefel does not use the medium of video, but painting. WYSIWYG are constructed visual worlds that — not least due to their size — overwhelmingly flow towards the beholder. The many layers of color attack the eye in the intersection and overlapping with one another. Knoefel's painting does not refer to any significance beyond itself. It does not represent something, nor does it bear a different meaning. Engaging with these images entails a constant scanning of their surfaces, an erratic exploration of the painterly details and their materiality. Especially when the large format canvases are hung close together, the resulting excess of information gives the act of beholding an almost physical quality that can only be escaped with the selective view of painterly details. Knoefel works in various media: photography and video, installation and also in painting. He is of course difficult to categorize, although his artistic work has always exhibited an inner logic and consistence. As Knoefel put it in an interview, art transforms permanently its form and means of expression over the generations, but ultimately confronts the same, central issues. In Kosmos' artistic cosmos, this transformation can be seen en miniature. He rarely intends to tell a story, neither in his video installations like Thoughts (1996) nor his installations that approach the realm of documentary photography, like Schlachthaus Berlin (1986-88). Important to him is however the spatial experience of his installations: Knoefel's painting betrays no individual rhythm in the use of the brush, no gestural expression. Knoefel constructs his visual spaces almost mechanically. These overlapping and interlapping layers of colors are reminiscent of the décollage of large billboards from the 1960s: one would like to remove the individual layers bit by bit, in order to expose the other color surfaces. These images are spaces, constructed to the smallest detail. In Knoefel's images, nothing is left to chance; each color surface enters with a new correlation with the neighboring ones, forms a new space and expands the individual experience of color and space in the eye of the beholder. For Knoefel, the fantastic thing about painting is the suspension of the gravity of regularity and the resultant self-determination of space and time.
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