Each Work is a Quivering

 

From light-flattened white to pitch black, Michel Kirch employs the whole gamut of shades of reality, together with all the registers of the world of form, from line to volume and from the geometrical unit to the space-violating smear. And the eye roves freely through this infinite freedom. Ineffably subtle greys create vast zones of pure abstraction like the hollowed breathing spaces of Chinese painting. Traceries of ultrablack surround deserts of white. Thus, in his visually vibrant works, Kirch creates at will enormous areas of breathfulness.

His language is incredibly diverse. Archaic and tenebrous, contemporary and luminous, it steers a course between muted planes of colour and structural signs, between suppressed carnal breathing and mental savagery, between the stylistically monumental and the creatively "loaded".

Kirch's seared blacks enclose fragile greys and take the lead, mobile night-dark stained glass hemming in the tenuous life of the white areas. They are vibrant with the secret of a far-flung graphic armature. Abstraction and figuration confront each other and each work quivers with sharp sustained tensions, formidable reserves of pure energy. The harmony of a work on the verge of the tragic, seesawing and transgressive.

In this always unique body of work little clusters of signs burgeon from chance smears, and in a kind of backlash cultural references shatter into underlying meanings. Kirch does not abandon space to chaos: he organises it with an opening, a trench, a furrow, a fault line or a way. A path for water, earth or light. Each work is a way, the dream-possibility of a different world.

Never does Kirch's prodigious visual vocabulary fall victim to "tricks of the trade". Varied and multiple, the effect of this truly created art is to immediately outstrip all possible expectations. There lies the impact. Each work is presence. Each work is apparition.

 

Christian Noorbergen 

Novembre 2014