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DIGITALIS PURPUREA

Human beings change from day to day and even from minute to minute. A painting, once finished, does not change. A Joachim Kersten painting, however, is so complex, so interactive, and so subtle that one can examine it carefully before turning away for a moment or for a decade, then turn back to what seems to be a new work of art. As one shifts position to the right or left, new effects of light are thrown into relief. Ideas, details, and even whole forms, unnoticed before, tease their way in and out of the field of vision. The artist devotes long hours to each piece, and the result is a work of art that rewards long and continuous viewing.

Kersten is an attentive student of the natural world, but he gives no clue of its appearance in his work. Instead, he bypasses the surface and somehow gets inside the very workings of nature. Like a tumbling mountain stream, his paintings have a reflective surface that gives way to luminous depths. Color pools up like dappled light through treetops; its circular shapes suggest raindrops or sunspots, echoes of thunder, or the steady pound of a heartbeat. The constant interplay of light and dark, microcosm and macrocosm evokes both subatomic particles and galaxies. Contrast and contradiction create emotional intensity; sharp changes in scale, from sweeping, mural-sized canvases to more intimate pieces, keep the viewer's mind in motion.

As nature engenders, dissolves, and regenerates, so Kersten constructs his work. He prepares each canvas with a rough, geological surface of modeling paste and plaster in very thick and very thin layers, building it into an organic composition before he adds additional layers of acrylic paint and shellac that create space and depth. He lays down veil upon veil of lucent brush strokes that hint at windswept deserts or sunlight glinting off the ocean. He improvises intuitively, at times disregarding the original surface so that a disc of transparent color may overlap but not entirely coincide with a circular rough shape. This interface might recall the markings of a seashell or a fragment of amber. It mimics a retinal afterimage; it may appear to wax and wane like the moon.

Kersten divides his time between Fort Worth, Texas and his native Nuremberg, Bavaria, where he has been accorded great honors as an artist. An invitation from the city of Schweinfurt, Bavaria inspired a series of five shows called Digitalis Purpurea. The first group, which opened in an exhibition space in a mid-sixteenth century city hall, seamlessly joined contemporary consciousness with massive, ancient architecture. Subsequent exhibits in the series are now traveling to museums and galleries in other German and American cities, including the current show at William Campbell Contemporary Art in Fort Worth.

Kersten maintains an active, lifelong relationship with every work of art he creates. "I can't always remember what state I was in when I painted a certain piece," he says, "but when I see it years later, something will grab me. I look forward to this. I want to be surprised again, like I was the first time. It seems that there is always something more."