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A
Retrospective View of the Singular Charles S. Klabunde
By: Ed
McCormack November-December 2002
/ January 2003
Published by Gallery & Studio
It
is wholly characteristic of a Charles S. Klabunde’s almost perverse
originality to mount a major retrospective in the obscure little riverside
hamlet of Frenchtown, New Jersey, far from the fashionable precincts of the
official art world.
Klabunde,
after all, is a phenomenon apart. A
welcome anomaly in contemporary art, he is a prolific printmaker and painter who
has chosen the path of passionate humanism over mundane careerism.
In the tradition of Leonard Baskin, Jacob Landau, Maurice Lasanky, and a
mere handful of other independent spirits who have bucked the system, going
against current trends and fashions, Klabunde’s work springs from moral and
philosophical principles and convictions, as opposed to the historical
imperatives of modernism.
“The
Sirens” (Pencil Drawing 50”x 38”)
As
with all great humanists, the armature upon which Klabunde’s work in both
printmaking and painting has always rested is his surpassing draftsmanship.
This is the focus of “Black and White,” a 35 year retrospective of
Charles Klabunde’s etchings and pencil drawings, at Beyond the Looking Glass
Gallery, 33 Bridge Street, Frenchtown, New Jersey, from November 2 through 30.
(The opening reception is Saturday, November 2 from 4 to 8 PM, and the
exhibition can be viewed from 11 to 5 on Saturdays and Sundays, and by
appointment by calling 908-996-6464.)
Many
of the works in this show, spanning the period from the 1960s to the present,
have never been exhibited previously. Others,
however, are well known to Klabunde’s collectors and admirers, including the
four deluxe edition European boxed books of etchings and engravings,
respectively entitled “Cycle of Sangsaric Phenomena: The Tibetan Book of the
Dead (1967),” “The Seven Deadly Sins (1971),” “Samuel Beckett’s The
Lost Ones (1984),” and “Studies of the Revolutionary Mind (2000).”
In
each series, one sees how Klabunde’s images illuminate, rather than merely
illustrate, the texts from which he takes inspiration.
In the etching “Cycle of Sangsaric Phenomena #III,” for example, the
mystical qualities of the Tibetan Book of the Dead are conveyed with surreal
figures orbiting a darkly cross-hatched cosmos around a brilliant orb that could
appear to be a portal to their n ext incarnation.
By contrast, in “The Seven Deadly Sins” series, various
preposterously grotesque beings recall Odilon Redon’s desire to create figures
that are “impossible according to the laws of possibility.” Yet, we
recognize the bloated, coverous figure of “Greed,” and the fanged monster of
“Anger” – the latter replete with ballistic erection! – as symbolic
surrogates of our own worst traits.
“Terrifying!”
Samuel Beckett himself declared on first viewing Klabunde’s etchings for
“The Lost Ones.” This was high
praise, coming from the Master of Despair, and wholly justified, for Klabunde
fleshes out Beckett’s desolate mindscape with visions of hapless, misshapen
souls climbing crooked ladders to nowhere or idling like icons of dysfunction,
their limbs propped limply on crude crutches.
This series, especially, exemplifies the Existential Realist phrase of
the artist’s work.
But
perhaps the most powerful of all Klabunde’s boxed books for its prophetic
qualities is “Studies of the Revolutionary Mind,” the series of etchings
created to illuminate his own eloquent text, focusing on “the incomprehensible
horror of genocide in the twentieth century.” For, while both the text and the
etchings were created well before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the figures
that we see in “True Believers” and “Ideology of Madness” chillingly
externalize the inner demons of those who would take thousands of innocent lives
in the name of an abstract ideology.
In
his most recent work, however, Klabunde has moved from inner demons and internal
fantasies toward a new affirmation of life in all its most sensual and beautiful
outer manifestations. This creative
metamorphosis has occurred as a natural consequence of his move away from
nihilism and existentialism, toward spiritual transcendence.
AS the visual vehicle for expressing his personal growth and
philosophical rebirth, the artist has chosen monumental images of the human
body. Now no longer grotesque,
misshapen, or symbolically deformed, the bodies that he presents are ideally
beautiful in the majestic series of very large pencil drawing poetically
entitled “Burned by the Fire of Our Dreams.”
The
title itself is as visionary as any phrase ever dreamed up by William Blake, and
the figures, derived from the dance, that Klabunde delineates so sensitively in
his new series soar as weightlessly as any of the angelic beings that Blake set
in flight in his heavenly illuminations.
Klabunde’s
figures, however, are creatures of flesh and blood, their nakedness at once
sensual and innocent. Seen
singularly, poised in mid-leap, or interlocked in erotic embrace, their
anatomies are depicted in specific detail that lends each figure the unique
features of an individual, yet, by virtue of their physical perfection, their
flamboyant gestures, and the monumental thrust of Klabunde’s compositions,
each figure takes on the ideal qualities of an archetype.
That
the figures are set against pure white expanses of paper, with no backgrounds or
even the suggestion of a floor to ground them, invites comparisons with the
large graphite and charcoal drawings that Robert Longo executed in the 1980s.
But there the resemblance ends, for while Longo’s figures are fully
clothed in contemporary styles and seen in freefall, like shooting victims
crumpling in some film noir drama, Klabunde’s (with rare exceptions, such as
the two seductive female figures perched on the rocks in diaphanous garments in
“Sirens”) are nude and considerably more mythic.
However,
even the apparently horned an cloven-hooved satyr embracing the statuesque
female nude in Klabunde’s “Erotica Entwined,” could very well be a dancer,
given Charles S. Klabunde’s recent predilection for imbuing all that he
observes with a sense of magic, as opposed to conjuring magic from the
subconscious.
In
any case, it is well worth the short trip to Frenchtown, New Jersey, to see more
than three decades of prints and drawings by this singularly gifted artist, who
is reportedly now at work on a project called “The Passion of Christ,” as
well as a series of Native American portraits.
So,
one is advised to phone the gallery posthaste for traveling directions.
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