THOUGHTS ON THE PAINTINGS OF SIMON VINZENZ KLAUSEN

The Building Blocks of a Peculiar Metropolis

Gazing at Simon Vinzenz Klausen’s paintings, we plunge into a world whose details

are both fascinating and dynamic. We feel compelled to peek into Klausen’s

universe, where, through the means of art, he holds up a mirror precisely to the world

in which we ourselves live.

Before us unfolds a grotesque, pulsating metropolis in vivid colors: towers, roads,

buildings and lampposts leaning toward each other—lampposts that emit no light,

and yet seem to guide the way. On the walls, button-like patterns appear, reminiscent

of an electrical switchboard, devoid of human encounters or traces of nature. In one

painting, a jagged-edged overpass, like a conveyor belt, sweeps over rooftops,

beside it the glowing letters of a billboard proclaim: “Showtime!”

Elsewhere we notice strange faces—yet they do not notice each other, even when

side by side or rushing together in the same vehicle. In another, a tiny figure fishes in

canal-green water, while robotic fish skeletons glide past above. Ultimately, the

constructed scenes lean more toward abstraction than figuration, though their point

of departure is always the external world and its twist into the unreal. The painter

perceives the disintegration of the world, and so on canvas it too breaks apart into

elements, like a city built from toy blocks, toppling with a single motion.

Alongside the densely packed compositions, we also find canvases that appear

almost empty, showing another face of billboard-loneliness in the metropolis. Here

the city itself disappears; the background is nothing more than grayish smoke. In the

foreground, a skeletal figure gropes its way forward, or faces mounted on sticks stare

back at us like ancient tribal masks. Yet the viewer has no doubt: what we see is not

the art of the past, but much more the art of the very near future—or even of the

present.

There is something undeniably futuristic in Klausen’s paintings. His spiraling concrete

roads and twisted skyscrapers, with their sharp colors and block-like forms, evoke

less the actual future than the way children might imagine it—with all its absurdity

and unease. This unsettling sensation is sometimes intensified by the colors

themselves: rusty browns, blurred reds, and the greens of tanks blending into one

another. Klausen’s imagined cities are most often crowded and faceless, leaving not

a square inch of canvas for us to breathe or glimpse a slice of sky. In his visual

language, urban anxiety escalates to the extreme.

Here, a stylistic kinship emerges with German painting of the 1920s, particularly with

George Grosz, whose satirical works depict the fractured spaces of Futurism

populated by the lonely, disillusioned, and repellent figures of Weimar Berlin. In

Klausen’s case, these kaleidoscope-like figures hide themselves far more deeply,

their wide-open eyes staring outward as they merge into the elements of the

enclosing metropolis. Humanity disappears; intimate encounters are nowhere to be

found. The soul is replaced by the facelessness of the urban.

Klausen’s paintings are remarkable, among other reasons, because with his unique

visual tools he simultaneously reaches back to the socially critical realism of the

1920s tinged with Futurist influence, while updating it for the grotesque, extreme, and

uncertain playworld of our own time—where the brightly colored building blocks of

our existence rise into ever taller towers, tottering ever more precariously around us,

yet still preserving the possibility of interconnection as they grow.

The singularity and relevance of Klausen’s art lies in the fact that he not only

manages to shape into form and express in the language of painting this deeply

rooted, generationally shared experience, but also the instinctive longing that springs

from it: the yearning for human interconnection, which speaks of all of us and to all of

us.

— Lilka Koncsik

Art Historian