From the publication Klodin Erb: Metamorphosis by Filipa Ramos
“Notre âme non humaine et immense, géologique et cosmique, parcourt l’univers, sans que nous en ayons vraiment conscience.”—Paul B. Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi
Klodin Erb is an incredible painter whose work possesses a quasi-magical capacity: rather than using the eyes to communicate with the mind, as most paintings do, hers speak to the mind through the heart and stomach. This means that her work is first felt in a visceral, circulatory manner before it reaches reason. Later, it is remembered through affects rather than thought images.
For this reason, I feel uncomfortable writing about her drawings and paintings, as words fall short of how much they do and there are more pleasurable things to do with them. I would rather talk to her paintings, ask them questions, sing with them, lie down and spend hours staring at them, as I have been doing lately. These are the real pleasures of being invited to write a text. But when the writing begins, you start to betray your artwork companions you made over the weeks that led up to the moment when your hand first scribbles something about them.
This is why my first word was not a word but a promise: Metamorphosis. An oath to change and transformation, an entity in permanent reconfiguration, an ungraspable term that slides through your hands like an eel in a muddy stream. Metamorphosis is the paint that Klodin Erb uses, the shape of her brushes and pencils, the trait that adheres to all her works, that brings them together as one, despite their variations and series. Metamorphosis is also an important figure: for the times we are living in when so much is in crisis and change and there is so little to help us cope with it, and for the recognition of the extraordinary work of this artist, whose midcareer phase—itself a milestone of metamorphosis—should be rejoiced for its maturity, certainty, and strength.
Multiple and iridescent, metamorphosis manifests itself in various ways in Klodin Erb’s work. Transparency is one of them. Three recent series attest to the phenomenal manner in which transparency and metamorphosis are entangled in one another. These are the 2016/17 series Transformation, large bluish flowers, only petals made with Chinese ink on canvas; the 2021 series Kräfte und Säfte (Powers and Juices), vegetable creatures in motion, made during the pandemic with dispersion, oil, and spray paint; and a series of abstract landscapes, also made during the pandemic, between 2020 and 2021, which the artist described as “events,” acknowledging the influence of Donna Haraway’s ecofeminist stances and encouragement for the necessity of making kin, worlds, and spaces of refuge. Subject matters, scales, and figurations are unrelated across the three bodies of work. Yet they all emerge from delicate layers and veils of ink and spray paint that, retaining their liquid memory, create surfaces and patterns that dilute into one another. They are fascinating in their organicity, revealing how creation exists as a process of porosity and becoming-with. These transparent and translucent patches of ink create irregular forms, movements, and contourless shapes from which forests, underwater landscapes, cosmic settings, and dreamlike scenarios appear. These watery drawings and paintings are pregnant with narratives and stories that speak about the interconnection of life and mind, about nature being all beings (including ourselves), and about how our symbiotic soul traverses the universe and inhabits all things, living and non.
This ecological mindset that appears in Klodin Erb’s work—ecological in the sense of understanding the whole world as one and as our home, our oikos, a continuum of relationships of mutuality and co-creation—further celebrates the principle of metamorphosis that is indistinguishable from it. For if all things are connected and an ink blot can be the petal of a flower, the wing of an insect and a ripple in a watercourse, then all things belong to and have once been one another. This axiom of circularity and transformation speaks to philosophy and the environmental humanities but also engages with how art changes and evolves over time. The series Kräfte und Säfte depicts creatures originated from a timeless account of the life and agency of more-than-humans. This is in part thanks to the interplay between what is seen, what is guessed, and what is imagined in the images (are they actually dancing humanoid carrots and embracing ginger roots, or are we projecting or dreaming those forms and movements?)—and in part because they are representations that recognise and update late medieval and Renaissance illuminated figures such as mandragoras or other magical entities.
Klodin Erb, Striptease, 2016, oil on canvas, 24 × 30 cm, Credit Suisse Collection. Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich
Striptease, 2016, oil on canvas, 24 × 30 cm, Credit Suisse Collection. Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich
The fact that these beings are painted on Japan paper treated with fish glue, which makes them both shiny and transparent, disclosing the frame that holds the entire setting in place, gives them an even more magical allure, as they seem suspended in air, made of pure light, colour, and movement, flickering and dancing in front of our eyes.
Metamorphosis is equally vivid in instances when Klodin Erb is not working with these liquid compositions and instead uses oil painting. Such is the case of Orlando (2013–21), a complex exercise of variations in style around traditions of portraiture, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s eponymous novel. A series of almost 200 small paintings, each depicting a different individual facing the painter, form a large ensemble that celebrates the diversity of modes of being, the beauty of hybridity and ambiguousness as well as the different stylistic approaches that can be adopted to represent a face. Here again, the endless variations of the self and the many traditions of making art come together to enhance a metamorphic essence of being, and of being represented.
More recently, the artist has been executing a parallel operation of syncretism, bringing together even more distant times. Inspired by a series of neolithic female stelae exhibited at the Landesmuseum Zürich, she started the series Glossy Idols (2022). Like the 5000-year-old sculptures of stylised women, these are also tall, flat female figures that carry coded signs on their bodies. But unlike the ancestral stone women, these are painted in spray paint and enamel on wood. With a human-like stature (funnily both anthropomorphic and phallic), they bear painted emojis amidst other figurations. Each Glossy Idol displays a set of symbols—for instance, the Goddess of Love, Melons and Plants carries, as the name says, a watermelon and an eye, while the Goddess of Water, Tears and Apricots includes a peach emoji, a speech bubble, and some drops of water. These ideograms are at once identifiable and opaque, mysterious and fun, ancient and very contemporary. With this painterly interplay of symbolic, non-linguistic language, Klodin Erb connects our age, communication schemes, and aesthetics to those of the prehistoric times to which these figures allude. As such, she becomes not only an image-maker but also an interpreter and a quasi-shaman. And her art helps us decipher and navigate the ever-changing codes that distinguish, but also bring together, the political, cultural, personal, natural, and technological realms that shape our world and the art we make to make sense of it.
By Filipa Ramos
Published in Mousse Magazine, 15 June 2023
https://www.moussemagazine.it/publishing/klodin-erb-book-2023/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=button&utm_campaign=oo_klodin&mc_cid=fa1bae7fd6&mc_eid=1a40f97c7a
