Oliver Kropf paints infernal, abyssal scenes set within the modern
urban environment. The deserted periphery of urban agglomerations
forms both the thematic and narrative backdrop of the young artist’s
paintings. As a stage set, he chooses a landscape that lies outside
the public focus. It is characterized by the absence of the constant
and ostentatious gestures of renewal and maintenance that point to
the rationality and economy of modern civilization. The unnoticed and
quietly unfolding process of decay that shapes these urban fringe
zones is accelerated in his images and brought to dramatic climaxes
that carry within them the moment of violent destruction.
Abandoned factory buildings and former industrial halls are unsettlingly
overlaid by explosions of color and form that bury the traces of civilization
beneath them. The internal light quality of the images does not recall natural
sources; rather, in its intensity and peculiarity, it evokes media-transmitted
images of armed conflict or nuclear catastrophe. Here, however, it is not
the
human hand that directs the process, but the hostile atmosphere of a
wilderness that eludes all regulation and instrumentalization and forcefully
claims space for itself.
Within these apocalyptic scenarios, in which even the laws of nature
seem
to have lost their validity, individual figures appear who are absorbed by
these proliferating structures. They embody the type of the antihero, who
becomes the protagonist of events in this fever-dream-like reality. He
usually confronts the viewer in the form of stereotypical male figures or
grotesques. On the one hand, he appears as a loner battling the elements
in a blazing inferno from which there is no escape. He stands powerless in
the face of events and has no influence over his fate. On the other hand, he
confronts us in the role of the fool, who—cunning and without regard for moral
principles—secures sovereignty for himself and manages to survive in this
inhospitable climate.
The unleashed and oppressive energy of this painting extends beyond the
boundaries of the pictorial space, and the figures overwhelmed by space find
themselves within the viewer’s realm. Personal reality and the reality within the
image collide. It remains open who here is subject to an illusion, and which
reality proves to be the more persistent.
Katerina Cerny, text for the exhibition Oliver Kropf – High and Dry,
Brunnhofer Galerie, Linz, 2007