Knut Navrot: Painting Put to the Test​

Domitille d'Orgeval

in Knut Navrot – Limites, Paris, Galerie Gimpel & Müller, 2008, pp. 19-22.

Translation: Christine de Lignères

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To give attention to Knut Navrot’s paintings demands at once to desist from the misconception that follows it. If it mimics Geometric Abstraction’s attributes, it is only through the bias of false appearance. In fact, since the early 1990’s, the pictorial apparatus set in place by the artist imparts geometry with another finality than the one usually in currency. This specific usage should not, in any case, be thought of as the incarnation of moral truth nor of absolute order, but rather as a means to build the foundation of a methodical pictorial practice.

 

An encounter with the painter Günter Fruhtrunk in the mid seventies revealed to Knut Navrot the existence of a universe of which he was as yet unaware – that of Abstract and Constructed painting. This fortuitous event opened for him a new domain that could be investigated with his knowledge of Analytical Philosophy and Semiotics. Availed of geometry’s immediacy, he adopts its language and sets out in search of the degree zero of painting.

From the start Knut Navrot’s abstraction stipulates visually clear logical principles: an orthogonal agency of rectangular surfaces whose restricted colours are delineated with meticulous exactitude. What he calls ‘the limit’, the line that separates the places of colour, soon attracts his interest. During the 1980’s for instance, after having decided to define each coloured surface with only one limit, Knut Navrot paints compositions consisting solely of successions of vertical bands of various width. This work affirms with its own radicalism the autonomy of the pictorial elements: each band of colour exists as a discrete surface and abuts other ones rather than being situated in front or behind as in illusionist painting. Around the beginning of the 1990’s, the artist continues his experimentation with the limit this time by observing its finality when it is generated by full coloured forms. In 1998, to bring the intrinsic materiality of painting to the forefront, but particularly to remove any compositional arbitrariness, Knut Navrot decides to elaborate a pictorial system in which he assigns the orthogonal limit to the parameter zero. In a manner both empirical and methodical, all the limits, visually distinct, are comprised of 3 cm squares that add up to 49. The aleatory repartition of the three primary colours and either black or white on the surface, defined by the limit of each of the square engenders the paintings.

 

Knut Navrot’s skillful command of the laws of chance are a testimony of the richness and coherence of the system he has since devised. A few examples of its application will make clear its validity. The first paintings titled Bleu (Limites) undertake to separate blue from one of the two other primary colours with an orthogonal line, vertical or horizontal. The organization of the resulting 196 limits is random and considered a possible occurrence among the totality of existing organizations. Other examples: for the series titled Limites, the artist decides to place an orthogonal limit between blue and red, blue and yellow, or red and yellow. Out of the initial 49 limits and according to their position, either vertical or horizontal, the possibility of 588 arrangements is determined. For the series Limit occ. 1-479001600, the artist only defines one central orthogonal limit which produces an aleatory combination of 12 limits or one possible occurrence out of a totality of 479 001 600. Each of the layouts intends to exhaust the set of possible layouts and, as explains Knut Navrot, ‘Their multiplication enables an easier reading of the initial project’. However, the space at the artist’s disposal, that of the studio as well as the exhibition, usually restricts his presentation to a limited number of paintings.

 

The programmatic works of Knut Navrot result from pre-established data whose different elements are obtained without any aesthetic or sensory references. This refusal of arbitrariness is inscribed in a general project of demystification to which the artist has submitted the different parameters of the painting: the use of color is restricted, their placement depends on the law of chance, the work denies craftsmanship, the choice of a format is expunged since it results from the chosen methodology. Yet Knut Navrot is not deceived by the contingency which remains in his intervention – after all one could not negate his initial option for a certain system nor his definition of the conditions of production. With intellectual rigour he therefore regularly calls in question his non-choices, which finally remain choices. He recently decided no longer to work with the three primary colours and black and white but with the 42 samples of a colour swatch. He has also resolved to use these colours in groups of two and not three which seemed to him appropriate solely for the primary colours. Moreover his research could not evade the possibility of working with a rectilinear limit other than an orthogonal one such as that obtained from casually throwing a piece of paper in a 15 cm square. With similarly challenging motives, the artist could also have extended his investigation to curvilinear limits. Yet he did not consider this option, which presents too vast a domain of exploration.

 

Knut Navrot is engaged in a game in which he has established the rules and boundaries without a preconception of the final result. It would therefore be an easy assumption to think that the end is of no import, the painting being nothing but the trace of an experiment. Indeed, for being only the consequences of a postulate, compositions and chromatic juxtapositions forbid in some way all commentaries. And yet the painting as a completed oeuvre matters. Knut Navrot, its first viewer, eagerly awaits its discovery. This moment can be an occasion to reexamine some of the principles of the fundamental scheme, to appraise its infallibility or perhaps question its pertinence, ambiguities or limitations.

 

It is also the moment when the work is exposed to the confronting gaze of the other. Knut Navrot’s formal models invite the viewer to reflect on the elements proper to painting and the internal logic to which it answers: ‘The eye should examine and interrogate its vision rather than to indulge it’, he writes. It is a matter of observing how the parameters at work condition the format of the painting, its agency (in one or several successive panels), the structure of its surface, or the rhythmic motifs that punctuate it. Nevertheless, this pursuit of intelligibility doesn’t exclude that the work be appreciated under more formalist criteria or more intuitively. The art of Knut Navrot doesn’t necessarily require the decoding of its instrumentality, it can mobilize percepts directly through pictorial facts. Some paintings are singled out by the predominance of simple rhythms and their recourse to elementary structures. Those that are executed in black and white are arresting with their minimal austerity and the visual strength of their rhythmic contrasts. Others, conversely, are characterized by the perceptual ambiguities induced by erratic successions of small red, yellow, and blue squares amid orthogonal compositions. The paintings constituted by a gathering of small autonomic square panels seem to question the relation between the work and the spatial surrounding. The negative intervals that separate them establish an active relation with the surface of the wall which becomes an integral part of the oeuvre. One feels an openness and an all-over(1) appropriation of the space that brings to mind the topic of the infinite (in Umberto Eco’s meaning) in the same way that Donald Judd’s three-dimensional progressions operate.

 

Navrot’s practice is the occasion of a scrupulously defined and rigorously respected exercise. The genesis of the work resides in the choice of a structural concept whose rules are enunciated in a precise, objective, sober and concise way, without analysis nor deliberation. This statement is followed by the process of execution, slow and meticulous, demanding patience and discipline. This faithful observance of a stern rule in the accomplishment of the creative act alludes to the artist’s admiration for predecessors such as Ludwig Wittgenstein or Robert Musil who exclusively and absolutely dedicated their lives to the realization of an oeuvre. Knut Navrot is open about his interest for Roman Opalka’s prescriptive approach to painting for which the substrate of a creative system produces a quasi-daily ascetic ritual. He also shares with the artist a concept of creation as work in progress(2) whose sense and unity are embodied when they unfold in time and space. However, there is in the modality of Opalka’s production a physical as well as psychological engagement that is utterly foreign to Knut Navrot. This autobiographical dimension, oddly enough, can be found in another artist’s work  for which he also takes great interest, Sophie Calle who exhibits herself as an active subject of the work often with insolence and ingenuity by following scripted rules and rituals around an idea, an experience.

 

Knut Navrot’s quest for objective grounds proceeds from a rigorous and scientific endeavor that could aptly be inscribed in the wake of the Concrete school of Zurich, notably that of Richard Paul Lohse who founded a system of painting based on mathematical methods and scientific practice. Nevertheless the artist does not feel any kinship with digital art or with Constructed Art. He has neither the temperament of a surveyor nor of a scientist. His recourse to mathematics could rather be associated to his interest for OuLiPo’s(3) exercices of style which, at the junction of language and mathematics, brilliantly circumvent and integrate formal and semantic constraints with a protocol very close to his own. It should be noted that the reference to literature in constantly present in Knut Navrot’s life. He says about his pictorial practice: ‘I make lines, it is like writing’. To write under constraint, or to paint under constraint, answers a desire not only of demystifying the creative act, but also of saying without saying as in the Nouveau Roman.

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Knut Navrot is engaged in an analytic processs that situates painting at the tabula rasa of its pure materiality. Rejecting the model of the artist as demiurge, and thereby refuting Hegel, his work dismisses both any narrative and mystical latency. His refusal of all verbiage may be an acknowledgement of the aphorism concluding Wittgenstein’s Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’. The artist abides by this ethic of silence through a theoretical premise that always brings him back to the degree zero of painting. This permanent deconstruction of previous accomplishments should be understood as a determination to exhaust painting, to put it to test, even if each time Knut Navrot reaches a different result: ‘The eternal return of the same is not the same’, as he likes to say. There is in his painting a tacit incompleteness which gives as much import to the unrealized as to the realized. In that way it is neither a beginning nor and end: implicated in perpetual motion, it exists in a permanent becoming; it is infinite.

 

1. In English in the text.

2. Id.

3. OuLiPo or ‘Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle’, was founded in 1960. It is a writing workshop that counts among its members writers such as Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec. For the Oulipians, writing must be submitted to formal constraints in order to explore the combinatory extent of language. Perec’s La Disparition (1966) is a lipogrammatic work of fiction that for more than 300 pages excludes the letter ‘e’ (Translator’s note).