Munich artist Victor Kraus has been exploring the depths of painting’s possibilities for over two decades. As he grapples with the themes and qualities of classical modern styles (figures, interiors and still life), he freely employs his painting method to reflect on the current debate in today’s art scene.

The act of painting and the desire to paint lie at the heart of his method. From his final work comes to pass a constantly stirring interplay of intuition – expressed first in an energized state of subjective location, and then in a reflexive treatment of differentiated settings: painting and over-painting, layer over layer, collage upon collage.

His still life, interiors and bio-morphed forms from the last few years reveal the mysteries hidden behind everyday subjects. Bordering on abstraction, Kraus’s flower and plant fragments can serve as a vehicle that sharpens the sense of being in both the natural surroundings and the man-made elements of our world. His work can thus in some ways transform reality into magic.

Quoted from an interview in the magazine „Autistic Dialogues,” Victor Kraus described his artistic method as follows:

I use the object as the starting point for a painting, seeking to free that object from its function, from its encumbered goal, then subject it to another order, perhaps that of beauty. This happens often through intense reduction, through the disintegration of physical qualities, through the elimination of the object’s weight or its shadow. Even the projection of space onto a non-illusionary surface helps bring the object into an inherently painted reality. Even my frequently used collages, from colorful, haphazardly partly dirtied paper, play a substantial part in this process.

Victor Kraus has earned both national and international standing through museum-based solo exhibits in institutes like Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, Sprengel Museum Hanover, Lothringer Halle Munich, Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, and the Goethe Institute in San Francisco. His art has also been shown in art clubs all over Germany, including Braunschweig, Heidelberg, Erlangen, and Dortmund. The Ahlen Art Museum is planning a large retrospective of his art in 2006.

The artist has also earned recognition through diverse art scholarships – including scholarships from the city of Munich and the state of Niedersachsen, and a Bavaria state scholarship for study in the United States (San Francisco) – as well as through art awards, such as the Nuremburg Art Support Prize, Art Magazine’s art competition prize and the Bavarian state support prize.

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In Victor Kraus’ oeuvre, the sensuality of Henri Matisse's spatial configurations meet NAME Morandi's serenely sober perspective on (still-) life. In most compositions, the Munich-based artist juxtaposes large pieces of modern minimalist furniture - such as chairs and tables – against the curveous overlapping patterns of bottles, vases, and exotic leaves. Interweaving arabesque lines further sensualize his environments’ contemplative rigor thus creating junctions of senses and the intellect.

Kraus enigmatizes the buoyancy of modernist domestic interiors by treating them with aesthetics of an archeological site. Layer upon layer of paint and pictorial intentions render his pictures’ otherwise flat surfaces complex and unpredictable. He, likewise, complicates spaces by presenting purposeful everyday items as irrelevantly and aimlessly drifting itinerants across the stage which they occupy.

Furthermore, Kraus alters objects’ raison d’être through over-simplification of forms by applying single gesture, seemingly incidental, and inventively bold brushstrokes. In addition, by allowing tiers of paint to bleed onto one another, he amends the sobriety of domesticated geometric paraphernalia. Thus, under the artist’s direction, functional and purposeful shapes metamorphose into decadent and quixotic ones by sheer force of abstraction and improvisation.

Throughout his work, we hear echoes of a perpetual dialogue between temperance and playfulness, between masculine and feminine modes and energies, which simultaneously harmonize and challenge one another. This discourse between strength and fragility is performed by applying various presumably conventional techniques. For example, random geometric forms support the otherwise ephemeral and arbitrary presence of natural references; fish, tree trunks, and foliages. In other instances, he juxtaposes a lonely branch bearing a single leaf or a multitude of solitary branches huddled together supporting isolated leaves; which, by the way, amazingly manage to avoid touching one another.

In yet another set of works, the painter intensifies the delicacy of Morandiesque bottles by suspending them independently in mid-air bereft of any structural support. Kraus, thus, reveals their vulnerability by locating them randomly throughout his enchanting residential abysses; theirs is the kind of fragility which most artists express through hyper-realistic depiction. Consequently it is via organization of spatial plasticity, in addition to the object's 'inherent' material delicacy, that Kraus renders images tender yet complex.

Time and again, the artist challenges his own creations’ serene order by applying roughly-hued and rapidly applied paint, or by rudely staining the canvas. He also invigorates their palette’s decorum by referencing touches of cobalt blue and bright olive greens … a touch of yellow here and an orange there. Gradually, bright jubilant colors indiscreetly have taken over the compositions; vibrant reds and oranges compete with exulted blues and greens in euphoric dances of anticipation and resolution. In traditional fashion, Kraus, however, keeps the thrill of eccentric colors in check by alternating them between stratums of “colorful, haphazardly, partly dirtied paper” collages.

All through his career, thoroughly deliberate choices save the painter’s oeuvre from falling into mere decorativeness and, equally, from the angst and solitude of intellectual contemplation. The constant give and take, the push and pull, of contradictory forces create harmonies which neither lull the viewer into languorous ennui nor confront us with their cleverness to overwhelm. Victor Kraus’ work express a mature, graceful and self-confident artist's uneagerness to impress; yet of one who is highly impressive!

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