Herman-Josef Kuhna: When art is accuracy

By Lilia Syarif Naga

JAKARTA (JP): Guess what you get from a professor who happens to be an artist and dedicated to his art? The answer: perfect and inspiring works as well as deep thinking and contemplation.

Some people used to say that professorship is the highest academic level and people in this "professorship society" are quite pedantic, serious and rarely indulge in the allegedly bohemian and irrational world of arts.

Herman-Josef Kuhna is an exception.

Jakartans are thrilled to be visited by this German painter with 50 of his paintings -- displayed at Gallery Lontar, East Jakarta, through Dec. 12 with the theme "Colors of Inspiration".

Kuhna says this is his first exhibition in Indonesia. It is being held in cooperation with Goethe Institute. Accompanied by his wife, he brought along his trademark works of art: paintings made of thousands of dots, glots, splotches, and blobs tinged with a touch of intelligence.

Kuhna offers multicolored paintings with each color having its own specific transparency, thickness, form, and structure, correlating to the proportion of the form. With great skill and independent confidence, Kuhna presents objects free of depiction that stress the autonomy of color.

Most of his works have similar styles but convey diverse moods wherein the surface of the pictures is worked in layers like densely woven material while every zone of the pictures is equally poised in an overall balance.

Kuhna seems to believe that color, to a great extent, is the main attraction of all objects and substances. He gets all viewers to indulge in color analysis, where one's eyes are suffused with color and at the same time carried forth beyond the picture.

Kuhna's impressionistic style is intriguing and modern, formulated in juxtaposed togetherness of hues. He emphasized that his style of work is from the genre of structuralism, while he himself compassionately adores Van Gogh.

The professor has never ventured to try other styles and he has claimed to use secret tricks to produce his well-known painting style.

Although they are object-free depictions, the paintings somehow miraculously generate vivid impressions, motion in a state of flux and flow, a flickering, shimmering ensemble of life and kicking creatures.

Some viewers might get the impression of observing organisms under a microscope, or staring at a vast galaxy, or enjoying light radiating through a prism, or even experiencing a bird's eye view captured through a cloud. But in general, Kuhna's paintings can persuade people to smile and to think momentarily. Oh, what a professor!

Jim Supangkat, a leading Indonesian art critic, says that Kuhna is a genius "crazy for color". Commenting on Kuhna's paintings, Jim describes them as abstract and not representative of anything but intentionally or unintentionally expressing a variety of statements.

Kuhna's paintings are rich with hidden meaning and capable of generating plenty of interpretation and stimulation as well as manipulating human emotion.

Jim says that Kuhna's style is derived from neither pointillism nor impressionism, but his paintings offer a hidden structure in a seemingly random arrangement of dots, lines, tints, splotches and meticulous tiny forms.

Dynamism and vitality can be seen, in fact, not merely in forms and objects but in the existence itself. Kuhna apparently believed that one can imagine a dimension and image in every existence and even become part of it.

In 1997 Kuhna made a work of art in the form of monumental mural on the Rhine Bank in Dusseldorf, Germany. His effort to make the new Rhine Bank more attractive received wide acclaim and he had made it a new center stage of urban life. Kuhna's work now serves as a colorful backdrop to the daily life of Dusseldorfers.

Almost unbelievably, if one stands close to Kuhna's painting, the person unwittingly becomes part of the art, and this magical formula works either if one is in a gallery or at the Rhine Bank.

Most of the time, Kuhna's paintings are oil on a cotton canvas and amazingly the paintings are the result of his well-patterned technique and skillful diligence. Kuhna paints with meticulous accuracy and perfection in detail as well as planning but the results seem random.

When I mentioned that Kuhna's paintings can make people smile, I am referring not only to the paintings themselves but also to the smartness of the titles.

While using the same style, composition and touch, Kuhna uses creative and inspiring names such as Purple Rain, Kolner Geologe, Softoff, Melodie, Claim, and so on, but he also gave the name, Rivertime (with numbers from one to 32) to at least 22 paintings.

Viewers' comments on Kuhna's paintings are also revealing; one said that from among the thousands of dots and blobs one could see a cosmos, or a revolving universe and from the same painting another person deciphered a woman or a herd of animals. And other paintings are allegedly capable of leaving observers in a delirious trance and prompting them to hallucinate.

What is not imaginary, that this exhibition demonstrates all too clearly, is Kuhna's growing reputation as an artist of international repute.