>> No Title /// Angela Stief /// 2021

Looking at the oeuvre of Suse Krawagna, it quickly becomes clear that it revolves around very little, yet at the same time around a great deal. What is apparent is the work’s experimental character. Its virtuosity originates from the repeated practice of applying lines: the pictorial narrative is dominated by isolated lines and webs of lines, lines that split up, that have lost their original course, occasionally their form, or that are in the process of losing it. Lines that run apart, thin out, in order to – possibly – converge again, that become many. Disappear. Become frayed. Multiply. Concentrate. Form structures. Deviate. It gives the impression that the form or the formlessness of the line on the picture surface evolves in an organic, almost coincidental manner. The pictures are defined by a strange rhythm of encounter and dissolution – desire, fulfilment, and separation. The linear as an uncommon staging of uncertainty, of what has not yet been, that does not create an obstacle to the future by giving up control.

This art certainly does not revolve around any kind of fashion, no short-lived superficial phenomenon as found at countless and superfluous fairs and exhibitions. No abruptly blossoming hype that fades away even faster than it emerged. This work possesses a different pace, resisting any kind of bustle. Without a deceleration in thinking, it may neither be seen nor received. It counters the at times disturbing current trends of acceleration, their everyday as well as their artistic counterparts. It formulates a rejection of the metropolises’ conducts of urgency. Krawagna focuses on something essential in art, by concentrating time, in a sense, into an aesthetic nucleus of the present. The more time one spends with the work, the more she unfolds her extraordinary timelessness, standing her ground in an almost audacious and fearless manner against continuous progression, the passing of time, the long-lasting. The concentrate of a rich art history on the verge of medial dissolution enrichens her. She constantly sounds out the relation between painting and drawing, or discusses the painterly within the graphical and the graphical within the painterly, respectively. Through an alliance of line and colour that is owed neither to the medium – graphic art and painting – nor to the material, Krawagna explores the boundaries of the depictable, and therefore also of perception.

Krawagna has totally dedicated herself to abstraction and has committed herself to a reduction in a non-art historical sense that has nothing in common with, for instance, Minimalism’s industrial production processes that replace the author. Always creating a relationship between the graphical and the painterly, and also playing them off against each other again later, the works on paper and canvas are based on an actual process of abstraction. They are not just non-representational or, a terrible thought to imagine, ideological. Abstract art is frequently reduced to the illustration of an ideology. The ideological, which usually comes along in doctrinaire fashion, has been ruled out by the artist in favour of something natural, impressionistic, in the sense of something that is impressive to her: it is mundane, random items that the artist discovers almost by chance. Everyday commodities, architectural details, bannisters, window sills, and diffuse, incidental plays of light and shadow become important influences, become the pictorial programme of Krawagna’s artificial universe. The artist’s interest is attracted by insignificant things that others might oversee. Emphasising the ephemeral also means giving significance and attention to the unnoticed. The poetic character of her oeuvre that often emanates a meditative peace and focus is maybe also founded precisely in the fact that Krawagna creates something great from very little, indeed almost nothing.