Stefan KUrten

Kürten’s garden proliferates with all the excess of Victorian design; his intricate gold and green leaves pile with the flat intensity of a fashionable orientalism. Detailed to the point of decadence, Kürten flits effortlessly between geometry and chaos, painting a monument to the careful control of disorder. Systemising the slow process of decay, he transforms it into something cherished and savoured.

In The Handsome Family, Kürten turns his hand to the supernal quality of modernism. Kürten wields his repetitive forms with the subtlety of Matisse: not initially obvious, but once spotted they appear everywhere. Geometric outlines of the architecture and furniture mix effortlessly with the organic curves punctuating the room. Kürten effuses light throughout with the omni-present speckles of pointillism, replicating a tree, cloudy sky and stucco. His slice of suburbia resounds with a cosmic rhythm, as perfect as nature itself.

Stephan Kürten’s paintings adopt a Renaissance era concept of beauty as mathematical precision. The finite qualities of science provide a working model for visual harmony and spiritual enlightenment. In Silence, Kürten bases his composition on the classical proportion of the Golden Mean. Disclosing this rectangular purity in the grid-like perspective of the building, Kürten repeats this Utopian ratio throughout; the organic disposition of the foliage yields to the refined rules of culture. In painting the precarious balance between nature and civilisation, Kürten finds affinity in its perfection of order.

In Long Time Now, Stephan Kürten’s ordered chaos reaches dizzying proportions. Kürten paints this suburban sitting room as an endangered victim of its own interior design, rapidly eroding under the raging persistence of chintz. The paisley upholstered chair sits impervious under the lingering threat of wallpaper gone out of control; the stone fireplace cracks under the unyielding pressure. The potted plants lining the room meld wilfully to their artificial counterparts. Through exaggeration of the ornamental, Kürten embraces and subverts the cliché of decorative painting. In his obsessive patterning he explores the virtuality of paint; his canvas creates a self-sustaining environment determined by its own mystical reason.

In Stefan Kurten’s Heartbeat, a backyard jungle creeps, as if by alchemic force, from the thick metallic ground. Possessing the divine quality of religious illuminations, Kürten’s gold paint suggests both richness of spirituality and material wealth. Kürten approaches the experience of painting as meditation: each twig, leaf and fruit, painstakingly painted with jewel-like effect, radiating with its own entrancing power. In this rustic Shangri-la, Kürten unleashes the awesome wonder in the nature of small things.