Karl Klingbiel | Every Force Evolves a Form

Karl Klingbiel’s deeply process-oriented methodology of image-building is designed to create paintings that serve not just as objects, but as arenas in which the paintings gain, over the course of their making, a certain autonomy, or countervailing force, rivaling his intentions for their resolution. This instability is the metaphorical core of the work, and both reflects and inhabits the disparate nature of the imagery contained within them. The paintings are pushed to a fulcrum of imprecision between intent and execution that results in a virtual self-creation, or in more mundane terms, a palimpsest of its own making, reflecting their history of refracted, layered, redacted, and distilled content, essentially becoming portraits of themselves.  Klingbiel intends the paintings to present a zone of activity whose species is not discernible, stating, “How the images are made, in the aggregate, is rather mysterious to me; whatever I arrive at, it’s going to be something else. If I try to fix on an image, it’s already moving away.” This tension, or instability, acts for Klingbiel as a kind of “stillness” and marks the painting’s resonance. “These paintings belong to me only as much as the influences that create them belong to me, and that is as it should be,” he states regarding the works in Every Force Evolves a Form. This instability of relationships, codified as unitary form, as objective understanding, is the mystery that we all live with, the truth we all tell ourselves.