Clemens Kindermann was born in Vienna on September 14, 1977. His childhood is spent among felt markers and sketch pads. From the age of two years he creates a cosmic variety of drawings on the continuous supply of paper provided by his parents Gustav and Carola. The effervescent mind of the child thinks up motifs of any imaginable genre. Fantastic creatures and heroes grace single sheets as well as the pages of entire volumes of comic books. The artist observes nature to depict complex physical, chemical and biological mechanisms of real or fictitious entities, and creates schematic diagrams seeking to explore the secrets of the universe in a proto-philosophical way. He documents his school years with caricatures of his fellow students and teachers. As an art history student at university, Kindermann exchanges copies of projection slides he sketches during classes for the lecture notes taken by his fellow students.

During this time he begins to develop a style of painting characterized by a high degree of realistic precision, meticulous attention to forms and detail, and materialistic precision. His medium of choice for most of these works of symbolist nature is gouache.

After briefly attending the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Vienna the disappointed artist traverses into an experimental phase, driven by the intention to leave realism behind.

With the ambition to achieve painterly abstraction, a change of paradigm becomes evident in his works. The message conveyed by his creations begins to expand from the iconographical towards the formal which dominates the whole of his paintings in a way no less reflexive to keep on spreading. It is basically the observer's choice between perceiving in the dimension of content or in the dimension of perception, which holds true for all objective works of art, but which Kindermann addresses in a radical way. On the one hand he continues to place great emphasis on the recognizability of what is depicted, on the other hand new formal structures demand their autonomy from the motif to be described within a purely informal concept. In fact his works, or rather the objective entity of his works, are visible only when viewed from a distance away. They show an encoded realm of contrast no longer executing but merely suggesting intricate painterly detail by means of position and vector of the frequently wide and pastose strokes of brush or spatula.

Kindermann's aim to achieve complete structuring by employing minimal means is joined by his desire to qualify the power of conventional, empirical reception of spatial objects, vesting in the picture the status of a preternatural index of the respective motif. While they convey the impression of an object on the one hand, the carefully reduced, respectively reductive brush strokes destroy whatever constitutes the conventional resemblance of an object. In this manner outlines and volumes and their spatial relations are cancelled out, broken through or deflected, even if they constitute part of the essential visual aspects, without detriment to the intended reception of what is depicted. Time and again the structural program seems to foil the clarity of the actual shape; yet the factual entirety appears to profit precisely from this circumstance. Instead of being treated as single elements the object's components gradually surface from an interlacement of brush strokes seemingly autonomous from them, lending these works a palpable technical independence. This trait is not least due to the fact that instead of an outré description of the components their existence is merely perceived as the byproduct of a superior principle. Upon closer inspection of the picture, prominent areas on the object may seem like coincidentally evolved negatives of the protagonists lending structure. This way some limitations incidentally result through contrasting areas or only as re-constructible connections of significant key areas in the perception of the observer. On the other hand, seemingly irrelevant relationships can be stylized into informal symbols according to formal discretion. The recurring combination of different painting techniques and the use of different materials on the one hand foster the aesthetic diversity of the paintings' abstract nature and on the other, contribute to their intended objective mysteriousness. Putting it roughly, in this point the works of Kindermann can be considered the opposite of pictograms which are based on bold isolation of single compartments to ensure the best information possible.

Lastly Kindermann blocks the object with a code whose origin from the matrix of the object seems completely irrational on the surface but is based on the claim of his own unique minimalism, purposely provoking ironic consequences. The fact that every single step is concisely calculated only becomes evident upon exploring the context. In a virtuosic manner Kindermann plays with the fact that the conditions of the recognizability of the portrayal can differ entirely from what is depicted. Formally speaking Kindermann's work could be regarded as sentimentally stylized snapshots of a phenomenological visualization of the material world, as accurate signatures of objects whose spatial effect appears only as the product of the skilled realization of an impression perceived by the observing artist in a temporary perspective. Consciousness of the three-dimensional expansion of the motif is used to create a counter object as paradox as possible to the motif. Could the observer spatially position himself inside one of Kindermann's paintings, the media used for depiction would be the dominant matter. The object itself, however, would be transformed into the choreography performed in honor of the idol. Was the observer to exchange the frontal view with a side view, only codes of construction would be visible. The reverse analogy of the idea of Analytical Cubism is inevitable. While Analytical Cubism unfolds the already recorded three-dimensionality into space, Kindermann changes the impression of the space presenting itself to a new, independent three-dimensionality to form the base with which the contents are interwoven.

Those elements however, which contribute to the phrasing of the message to be conveyed, gradually speak their own language enabling the conquest of new attributive levels. If the dissociation of the formal from content is possible in a way characteristic of the works of Clemens Kindermann, why should it not - and that is the intention of the artist -develop its own semantics so as to additionally augment content on a different ontological level. For this reason Clemens Kindermann increasingly chooses to employ abbreviations deduced from the object, referring back to it once they have emancipated from it.

The conveyed sentiment, of course, is of a much more mystical nature. The rough traces of creation are marked by archaic ferociousness, resulting in ingenious compatibility between the cryptic and simultaneously narrative geometric order of the brush strokes and menacing intensity to form a symbiotic relationship. And should the observer not be able to fully comprehend either, the magic aura of the objective informal and its puzzle picture effect prevail, uniting the aesthetic and intellectual objectives of Clemens Kindermann in his manifold ambitious work.

Leander McMennkins

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