2024 Interception – Absorption Solo Show at Koik Contemporary, CDMX (Mexico)

The pleasure of letting go. How many brushstrokes does a canvas need to be complete? This question seems like a metaphor for existence itself. An approximate answer? Impossible to know — perhaps that’s the pleasure of letting go. Magdalena Kluth (Datteln, Germany, 1997) merges with pigment (interception), and once she becomes pigment, she fuses with the canvas (absorption). This act is repetitive, but never the same. Perhaps this is the enigma of all pleasure: continuity and discontinuity. But between one situation and the next, the ‘crack’ inevitably appears. The ‘crack’ is a kind of rupture—derived from the vulgar Latin ‘crepta,’ meaning ‘to burst’— it is, strictly speaking, an ‘explosion.’ Isn’t the act of painting an explosion between pigment and canvas? Kluth understands this well. In this back-and-forth of intentions, intensities, and repetitions oscillating toward difference, Kluth embraces the lack of control—that is, the inexplicable emergence of color. To think of the explosion is to think of death, but also the birth of a wave in the ocean—the moment when the water breaks. The burst can be painful but also invigorating— above all, uncontrollable. It is an image of movement, the intersection between coming/going/coming, beginning/farewell/beginning. Magdalena Kluth’s works flow through phases of transformation, interception and absorption — a play between taking and letting go of control.