Selket Chlupka - The Marble Trail (Installationen, Malerei und Collagen)

SELKET CHLUPKA: THE MARBLE TRAIL

Those who have a true sense of chance can use everything random to define an unknown coincidence – they can seek fate with equal fortune in the positions of the stars as in grains of sand, bird flights, and shapes.
Novalis: New Fragments. Notes on the Margins of Life

Chance itself is merely the collision of creative impulses.
Friedrich Nietzsche:
Posthumous Writings

A branching landscape framed in dark night: there, crustacean red algae growing, here viscous or already solidified lava flows, there underground watercourses in doline-like depressions – funnel or crater-shaped – flowing into, there mangrove trees, their stilt roots grasping in shimmering mud, surrounded by mist. Or a face that flashes brightly, obscured by delicate branches, perhaps a fairy tale forest, perhaps a dark imprint – beneath it surely lies The Marble Trail, leading into the depths, once a passable path, here a boggy trail, there merely a vague trace in the background – a thousandfold. For Selket Chlupka does not take us by the hand and show us one path, one interpretation, perhaps the shimmer of the moon on the water's surface, swirling layers of mist faintly illuminated by the setting sun. No, Selket Chlupka does not aim for archetypal images that have been engraved in us through myths/fairy tales/images and seek correspondence on canvas. It is this peculiar working method of hers from which everything, whether intended or not, grows as a possibility and invites wild associations and a sense of losing oneself.

But how? To dispel the magic that spreads there, to avoid completely fixing the works as fairy-tale misty or enchanted forest landscapes, a glance into the studio helps, which Selket Chlupka quietly negotiates within the exhibition space.

There we see darkly primed paintings, to which cut-outs are first applied and then overpainted with lacquer.

What happens beneath the cut-out stencil remains uncertain. The artist allows layers of lacquer to flow into one another, creating ornamental streak patterns reminiscent of marble, whose ultimate appearance is only partially controllable. The cut-out literally imprints itself onto the canvas, meeting it, while the traces of the image are found again on the cut-out. Cut-out and canvas: both are artworks and tools at the same time; they are means to an end and the end itself, as if the process of creation were equally important to the final image product and hardly distinguishable from it for the viewer. But not only that: both are creative impulses – very much in the spirit of Nietzsche – that, in their collision, evoke nothing calculable, but rather something random. A randomness that is intentional, that is staged. Thus, we see lines of lacquer drizzled over the painting, almost symmetrically covering it. Yet here too, we suspect the guiding hand behind it, that very person longed for by Novalis, who has a true sense of chance, who applies the lacquer until it comes to a standstill: a back and forth between chance and control. Therefore, The Marble Trail is also the path of its creation, on which one can embark. But as mentioned: it is an individual one, reliant on the viewer who traverses it, as if they carried all paths within themselves.

Kevin Kuhn

www.berlin-contemporary-art.com