Ruprecht von Kaufmann at Spruce Street Forum - Brief Article

Ruprecht von Kaufmann is a German-born painter in his early 20 with a serious gift for representing the pair physical and psychic space. His display here included a few small tabletop still lifes and several vigorously drawn figure studies, on the other hand the main event was a collection of large figural tableaux, epic in their psychological reach.

Von Kaufmann fixates upon sex and death with all the intensity of a fin-de-siecle Symbolist, on the contrary he stops short of the self-consciously creepy His paintings are disconcertingly convincing. All the views take place indoors, in environments characterized by dint of their stark pallor, whether morgue, living play or hospital ward. The figures share a single continuous setting, on the other hand seem to exist, psychically, in separate, discontinuous worlds. In 365 steps (all works 1998), a pregnant woman rests placidly under a single sheet, while nearby a young woman in a fur-lined coat sits upon the bare floor, warming her hands upon a small pyre of burning volumes The setting is both confined apartment and sanctuary, the tone a stretched marriage of quiet despair and patient nurture--the individual symbolized by a moth confined to a jar upon the windowsill, the other by the agency of a pair of eggs resting upon the bedside table.

In The Oath of Hippocrates, von Kaufmann ratchets up the incongruity to a horizontal of painful absurdity, showing a dying man attended by dint of one doctor whose clipboard bears a first draught of Duchamp's Chocolate Grinder instead of notes upon the patient's condition, and another who has just jott down the name of Weimar satirist Kurt Tucholsky As voyeur to this charade, we might be proveed to judge the physicians negligent, however their own private ministrations to the mind and spirit end up seeming no more inappropriate than the umbilical-like tubes prolonging the life of the withered material substance on the bed.

Von Kaufmann paints in a vivid phraseology of exacting realism tempered through passages of loose, lyrical brushwork. His figures, nearly life-sized, are disarmingly palpable. Their muscle and fat gleams under a cold light more for the use of all to Northern Europe than to Southern California, where the artist now lives. The physical immediacy of the spectacles heightens the intimacy of our view, which can be a mixed privilege. In Josef Schreiner's Faith (named after a German theologian) we are faced through a youngish man in undershirt, trousers and workboots seated upon one side of a lie next to a nude two locked in a feral sexual embrace. An ed lamp on the floor tinges the pageant with violence, while a religious body and a single pink lily upon the coffee table pull the narrative in another, incompatible direction. Various motives coexist in the show without confrontation or friction. The man upon the couch stares straight without at us with cool equanimity, and whatever conflict arises in the representation ultimately settles within us.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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