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Oliver Kropf says: “Although one believes one knows how the world
works, one doesn’t really know it after all.” What lies behind this statement?
In his paintings, Kropf sets out in search of what lies behind the façade of
our visual perception - what lies, or may lie, behind the conditioned per-
ception we have been trained into since earliest childhood. As a “realist”
painter in the broadest sense - more precisely, as a figurative painter -
Oliver Kropf raises questions about actuality and reality. Is reality really
what it claims to be? Or is there something else behind it? Parallel realities,
perhaps? Oliver Kropf is interested in shifts and distortions of reality; he
seeks to overcome the “compulsion of the logical-rational” and to arrive at
new theoretical and visual results.

In our conversation a few days ago, he quoted the Swiss writer Friedrich
Dürrenmatt: “Our intellect illuminates the world only inadequately. In the twilight
zone of its limits, everything paradoxical takes up residence.” And that is
precisely the point Oliver Kropf is concerned with. He argues against believing
in the sole power of reason. With his paintings, he demonstrates the failure of
logic, the failure of the rational in the face of the complexity of the world and its
randomness. This may sound very theory-heavy at first, but his art by no means
claims only to be intellectual; rather - and this is essential - it is also extraordinarily
physical. Alongside a theoretical superstructure, we are confronted with a gestural,
wild, powerful mode of painting. The reasons for the physical on the one hand and
the intellectual on the other stem from Oliver Kropf’s personality: he reads a great
deal and engages with literature, Zen Buddhism, meditation, and also with the
writings and theories of Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology.
This constitutes, as it were, the intellectual side. The gestural side - the wildness
and physicality of his painting - according to Kropf, is also related to the fact that
he has practiced martial arts for many years.

I would, however, like to return briefly to a point I mentioned at the outset: namely,
that with his images Oliver Kropf exposes logical thinking, the rational approach
to the world around us, so to speak—by emphasizing and challenging the randomness
of the world. The concept of randomness seems particularly important to me in this
context, because suddenly we find ourselves right in the middle of Surrealism:
“the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.”
This sentence comes from the nineteenth-century French poet Lautréamont, who
was later upheld by the Surrealists as one of their figureheads. With this sentence,
Lautréamont had described the beauty of a young man. The Surrealists adopted this
description as a poetic image that had “unintentionally emerged from the otherwise
invisible everyday”—that is, by chance. These are the words of André Breton,
probably the most important theorist of Surrealism. In Breton’s texts, there is also
talk of “everyday life” being transformed by the image. Breton writes: “Only the image
can show me what liberation is possible, and this liberation is so all-encompassing
that it frightens me. Through the power of the image, the ‘true’ revolutions could
gradually be accomplished. In some images, an earthquake is already present
in embryo.”

In Oliver Kropf’s works, I also see such a force, a wildness striving to make itself
heard. His working process, too, thrives on chance. He primes his canvases; paint
is applied over large areas, and after drying, the randomly created structures are
reworked and filled with figurative content. This process is repeated several times.
Again and again, new, randomly emerging structures appear, which Oliver Kropf
takes up as inspiration in order to let images become reality. In his art, Oliver Kropf
creates, constructs, and shows us realities that did not previously exist in this form.

Hartwig Knack, opening speech for the exhibition Oliver Kropf – Happy Hour,
Galerie Frey, Vienna, 2009