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.

As an abstract painter I have always been drawn to the tension, in Mark Rothko’s words, between “the absolute of intellectual abstraction and the palpable world”. There are few things that to my mind illuminate this tension: abstract art, classical music and jazz, and poetry. As our society increasingly moves away from the palpable toward the virtual, this tension is obscured, as the palpable world becomes increasingly diminished; and in this diminishment we increasingly long more and more for place, as place is where emotion and ideas form, rather than an unstable locus from which they are dictated. From emotion and ideas comes meaning.

I consider my work as providing “place” in this conception, a point of meditation and reflection upon the collapsing nature of what we consider “real”. A painting is simultaneously a “place” and a reflection of place; both an object and a reiteration of the component parts of that object. It is this kind of non-duality that the Symbolist poets such as Paul Valéry and, later, Wallace Stevens sought to achieve, to make the ostensible stabilities of the external world answer to the individual’s varying apprehension of them, and to collapse the differences between the two, thus privileging perception over determinism.

The title of the exhibition, The palm at the end of the mind, like the titles of the individual paintings, are all taken from lines or fragments of lines from the work of Wallace Stevens, whose poetry has long served me as a guide to, and a reminder of, the sovereignty of the human imagination.