Robert Musil, « The man without qualities »

We try again and again to find outside ourselves the supports of our desires, whereas the trouble they cause is an essential part into our intime personnality.
In my paintigs I don’t feel acting as a « voyeurist », but will express an interior or even introspective thought. To me drawing nude bodies means describing souls, and the real subject is the irruption of storming and theatening desires into these bodies.
Frustrations or enlacements, satisfaction or absence, all these fluctuations of desire impose an absolute tyranny and impress their rythm to the work, so that the picture progresses though successive urgent drives in an endless alternation of expectation and fulfillment. Enlacements are symbolised by incisive strokes of charcoal crayon, physical gesture to paint, attractive charm of pigments, and absences by expanse of blank spaces, possible collapse of motives, apparent fragility of colours diluted up to tranparency.
What is abstract, what is narrative in these pictures ?
The work is structured from the point where a whole scene may be summarized
by few decisive strokes; and imaginary world gets into its dark sides and the unconscious leads the artist’s hand, as would surrealistic automate writing do.
Each gesture possesses its intentionnality, but each accidental stain is integreted to the intention and surprises as would an amazing encounter do. So the work can only reach its intense signification when the result is simultaneously logical as a structure and impossible as a representation. The strokes are unpredictable and uncertain but the result is always occurate and significant.
Paradoxally this opposition gives to the painting a sensation of serenity, as only some landscapes would be able to give.

The pacing man is levitating,
Step-dances airily on non-existent floorboards,
His space of action is immaterial, built from mere perspectives.
Our man despises whatever serves a purpose; he just cannot fathom the idea,
And watches sceptically the stones of reality piling up around him like mountains,
Convinced that discarding metaphysics in favour of practicality renders one’s life obscene,
He tilts back his head to better observe the sky,
Hoping to discover an answer to his dilemma.

Karen Farkas