Imi Knoebel: etcetera Review of the artist's show at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris by Patrick Javault

By Patrick Javault 

Imi Knoebel notoriously refuses to theorise or give interviews. ‘etcetera’, the name given to his new series of paintings begun in 2023, can be understood both as a mark of discretion and as an apostille to a considerable body of work spanning almost six decades. On aluminium panels, rectangles with irregular edges, he paints monochrome backgrounds and, on top of them, vertical or horizontal lines and circles that suggest letters or numbers; but also daubs or sketches of wefts. These gestures and strokes are standards of gestural painting, repeated in a mechanical way. The acrylic paint is usually spread in a fluid manner, sometimes revealing the marks of the brush hairs.

Knoebel ventures into gestural painting with the same radicalism as in his large monochrome works, and with the assurance that comes from a work that has been built up over a long period of time. This is abstract expressionist painting without any hero-existential blather, but without any irony either. These new paintings are a double manifestation of freedom, that of the artist and that of the strokes and daubs themselves, projected into space by the luminosity and shape of the support. The viewer has the impression of being right in the middle of the painting process.

In the small-scale horizontal works painted on plastic film, exhibited on the first floor, the gestures and lines are the same, but more highly concentrated. In this case, we are more sensitive to their energy, to the interplay of transparency and depth, and to their way of avoiding anything resembling composition.

 (Translated)