limits
the image is free. language demurs at its border and leaves us with our bodies. we have to think for ourselves. we don’t mind thinking for ourselves. we wait for the sensation that is us thinking our worlds through the differances that surround us. if we allow ourselves even the slightest of attention, something can flourish. this field is golden with the new. we handle it with subtlety. we respect what remains unknown. we construct a new world which is much kinder than the one we leave behind. it takes great care of the flowerings. especially the quiet ones. we make use of everything, replenishing as we go along.
the relationships that form between ‘image’ and ‘title’ in her painting and drawing are central to k.fpieters practice. they are quiet things. sometimes they stand absolutely still. She builds her work around these two nuclei using them as orbits to explore openings across territories. she puts them into spin.
The first territory, the image, is itself predominantly a non-human/non- representational composition of line and colour on a field. this does not mean that human effects are absent. We can be deeply effected by colour for instance; but here, like the artist herself, we have to respect the fact that this composition of matter is inherently a difference that keeps its mysteries. we can but wonder. It is like watching the sky. We are confronted with the beauty of the world itself, just so. an ISness.
She could have left it there. it would have been enough.
However human culture and its implications have also always interested her. she assembles these emergent constructions into very contained series of works and attaches resonant NAMES to them with her titles. loading beside this non-human composition a completely human thing; language and its culture. she calls on moments in poetry or philosophy; sometimes the law. sometimes history. recurring meditations manifest themselves differently at different times with different works. these provide the second nucleus around which an interweaving can begin with the first.
We, ourselves bring to the work reactions fat with our own singular histories, knowledges and sensibilities and these are thrown into the mix. we start associating across the different fields, creating our own merging responses to the experience. It is here in the space that opens up between these entities that a fluorescence takes place. we are not being told anything. proir knowledge is not to be recognised here. we are being offered instead the generative power of our own thought. if the work represents anything at all it is this possibility.
kfpieters oeuvre is generous, it tenders to us our own speed of reverie. fast and shining like the wind or a slow steady reflection that builds many possible relationships. these interconnections have continual radiating effects and can fold back, transforming by doing so the worlds they came from. the worlds within the painting. the worlds within ourselves. The work is a gift that allows us to encounter the richness of the worlds’ differences and in this clearing our response takes measure of our humanity.
albert caeiro
march 2018
everyONE
we did not ask what the painting represented, nor what it referred to, nor what its historical provenance may be. but asked instead what qualities emerged from it. he told us all the senses he found.
they said that the compositional works will veer madly close to the sign but nothing will ever be definitely determined. they remain possible. and every time. they move toward life. inside life. for life. here perhaps is a dimension of ethics concerned with difference and freedom for the whole world. the humans too. the humans too. they too everyONE. she told him all the senses she found. they were different to what he found. both were something and correct.
here it is; the pale blue ‘mise en scène’. let us forget the kitchen completely. what a triumph! —to begin to transform a long sadness into summer. that of which passes by. a force, a pressure gathering its moments. possibly. everything is in time. a time when finally something: the very thing; is transformed from a hard negation into a discerning happiness. and why not. lets find the poet that speaks of the shining things.
the joy of a mature human being is a densely layered sentience. complex, a long coming to know; something that is built, never given; necessarily a radical innocence; always and each time hard won. if won at all. very rarely won. the joyful life. when she was quite young she observed that it was easy to be dead. she noticed that light would always cross the room.
albert caeiro
october 2013
pr e s s u r e
silence and beauty are human unhuman things. we stretch out to them beyond the human and back into the human. sometimes it is only a colour. and it depends on the light and our feeling as to what will or will not come to us. it is not a static. it moves. it is difference through time.
we can leave it there. we can speak of other things. literature. surely very human. stéphane mallarmé. a poet. french, late nineteenth century. concerned with the death of god. so therefore the death of truth, transcendence, the conscious. So what then amongst such rubble? what is life without truth? what is truth?
maybe a colour. colour that moves across.colour that inhabits a zero degree. that can have no claim to truth or god. that is light. that is nothing. that is possible. a river perhaps in middlemarch, a dark night track heading for the water. vague and meaningful talk in the quiet air. what does it mean? what is necessary? what is chance? contingency? what is a life when there is no truth?
these things mallarmé asked of in his poem ‘a throw of the dice’. he talked of shipwrecks. the shipwreck of truth. he pondered a constellation. a night sky. he was not entirely depressed at such a prospect but for me it seemed he was insufficiently enough in wonder. however he did ask the question which turned pressure toward him. such a rock, a false manor. and she loves the night skies.
albert caeiro
may 2013
encounter
this orchestration, these intimations —this painting. it is. it is a painting. it is concerned with ART. it is an example which is not (the Name, the Law). other-than. and i would prefer not to. tends instead toward a clearing. a clearing of trace. a field of gestures which do not and will not name your house.
silence? …rather the light that will cross a room.
““the painting reaches out to an encounter. it seeks it out. speaks toward it. a making toward. the painting making toward anOther, each thing, each human being. the attentiveness a painting devotes to all it encounters.
A painting—under what conditions! —becomes the poem of someone (ever yet) perceiving, facing phenomena, questioning and addressing these phenomena; it becomes conversation— the painting itself really has only this one, unique, momentary present.
when in the immediacy and nearness it lets theOther’s ownmost quality speak: its time. when we speak with things this way, we are always dealing with a question of ‘staying open’, ‘coming to no end’ pointing into the open and void and free— we are far outside.””
we are inside a turn of breath. we lean toward the clusters, the questions, the far dancers, the whispers, the intensities, the dreaming. we seek out the common. amongst the grass; small flowers. we share speeds. we wander amid this murmuring air and here silence keeps over the radiant. we grow inside our unknowable houses. in this finding we share cinnamon amongst friends. merely having been there, we sweep the blue fields.
albert caeiro
october 2013
thread
&…so this impersonal involves paradoxically something extremely intimate. it touches you but like a glance. it slides off. sometimes it will hold. grow larger. return. return differently. cluster in another formation. suffuse with something familiar. that is how it is with living through.and always there are increases. that odd experience in the old abandoned garden. huge trees towering but it is not a wood. clear dappled green. there is a cat looking to be a friend. and flowers in the bushes. many leaves and soft rain. history is palpable there but only because you know this was a botanists dream.
you drop it. it disappears. it comes back. &…he said the contingent is that which comes from out of camera, from a complete unknown into the situation and shifts the field. chance is a set of known possibilities. any of them could fall. the necessary is what is chosen from these offerings. from this paintings are made. what threads will gather at any one time. the instant of something. the passing by. and is not the world full of green islands. the world is a good thing. we should look after it.
& …threads are curious. they weave in and out of a life in clusters. in words. in thinkings’ pressures. weak or strong. with pulse. ideas breathe. words do. from the words ‘the fiction of a hill’ which belong to sally ann mcintyres poem ‘the desert homeric’ to mallarmés line ‘in the desert perfume of those ancient kings’ and of course there was also another perfume. perfume once named a piece of music and also a film. that was even longer ago. time. a long and languorous thread. memory softly clouding an inadequate limit. how we do not know what a body can do.
&…a small journey in days to an inlet with friends. walks. incredible evening sky over the lagoon. hot sun along shady trees to drink champagne at the top of the pyramid. because it was christmas day. and later very misty in port chalmers. around back beach shifting misted light; enough to go down on ones knees for . we lingered taking photographs and lost time and the girl.
and in between picking up and dropping off things in the studio. and a jersey that he wore which was exactly the same colour as the painting. (they had shared the jersey over those few days) and each time we visited the studio either would stand and look intently at the painting for much longer than usual.
&…from these mediations she names/unnames because the meaning becomes sure. sure in an unknownness. and unknowness is certainly her pleasure and her thread. the paintings are saturated with this indefiniteness. they are free. open. they give and they hold back. at once gift and reserve. absence. refusal. offering. collapse. commitment.
albert caeiro
june 2013
memo: toward the painting set “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”
or haecceity (the thisness of things)
if he thought about it, these paintings were like a stroll in the park on a beautiful mild summers day. to walk oneself. the perfume! meandering slowly amongst soft coloured flowers. or perhaps reading a wallace stevens poem under a leafy tree. its so hot. its cool there. being taken up by this sense of humour. this sentience. the thingness of his world. this world. the ISNess of colour. languid air on skin.
often she thinks of spinoza on days like this. how he rounds on happiness. how happiness is one of those places where one finds the strength to confront what is not happy. to negotiate those many moments, large and small, when one is ashamed to be human. to be generous. this idea about learning to know how to make sure of happiness in our living; inside an ethics of well being. to make sure of a living that is more than survival for each one. a life that is a flourishing for each one.
and also there is the painter bonnard. those delicious colours of ordinary things. gardens. having breakfast. the bath. those moments that immerse life in itself. or none of these things. something else. something rather, that belongs to you. an unstable memory. some fission of colour. the sound of wood. this unfolding present that we are in when we may look at a painting. this particular. possible. alive thing. being such as it is; a whatever that of course, prefers, always to matter.
albert caeiro
august 2015