Exhibition: Kemar Keanu Wynter

Klaus von Nichtssagend is pleased to announce Rücken–, Kemar Keanu Wynter’s third solo exhibition opening on Friday, September 6, from 6-8pm. The exhibition delves into the profound emotional depth of Wynter’s work, revealing his sentimental approach to color field painting. The artist charts the sublime through a masterful technique that reconfigures one’s perception of space, texture, and flavor into mutable and tactile sensations, offering a full-body immersion.

Wynter’s alchemical process is deeply rooted in chemistry and memory. Born to a family of Jamaican immigrants who settled in Brooklyn, New York, Wynter came of age in a household where love and strong bonds manifested through gatherings and home-cooked meals. Guided by these heartfelt reflections, Wynter developed an artistic style he dubs a “visual Patois,” a unique language through which he can triangulate himself between the Caribbean, New York, and the innumerable geographies, cultures, and cuisines he has yet encountered. Artworks become totems of Wynter’s unique perspective, marking his ability to freeze time and reinterpret his experiences of intimacy and indulgence through sensual hues and feverish gestures. Every tantalizing note he consumes, he transforms into jovial recollections. Like an esteemed gourmand, Wynter contorts, diffuses, and performs pigment to map a haptic sensibility one experiences through taste and ambiance.

Rücken– is the latest result of Wynter’s ever-evolving articulation of a visual Patois. Plucked from the full term Rückenfigur, a nineteenth-century art motif popularized by German Romanticists, famously employed in Caspar David Friedrich’s seminal painting Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818). Rückenfigur translates to “figure from the back.” It’s a ubiquitous compositional device that evokes longing and invites viewers to complete the scene by stepping into the faceless figure’s role, embracing nature’s grandeur and power. In Wynter’s Rücken–, we are not just viewers but active participants in his religious entanglements with romance through the lens of synesthesia and cartography. Each large-scale painting transcribes feelings of love, abundance, and pleasure into an angelic mirage of colors that blur into one another across pulsating surfaces. In this visual dance, Wynter compels our eyes to scan voraciously. Each scene holds ragmented notes that coalesce into one body, recording dishes and atmospheres shared with his loves arading as wafting shifts in primal, illusive, and untranslatable speech.

In Knead Bee (Marionberry Cheesecake Ice Cream), 2024, lusty pastels disperse like spotty cloud formulations that foreshadow a lofty journey. Emerging from a late-night ice cream rendezvous after having seen L’Rain perform at Bowery Ballroom, the artist creates a blushing nude that dominates the canvas. Splotches of diluted oranges and mustard ochres emerge from the edges. Blending with rose tones–bursts of mint twist in this demure hue while a bioluminescent lavender curves inward from the left field. He prepares his paintings on sheets of a polyester microfiber called Evolon, laying them on the ground before he applies acrylic to the heavily wetted surface. Wynter works into the surface repeatedly until the ideal image takes form. The artist hangs each painting untamed by borders, with the back side facing us, revealing pigment that has shifted and migrated through the porous surface, resulting in weathered and wrinkled striations that fawn a darker patina. The colors we see carry a temperance to them, repositioning our gluttonous appetite into a tender modality that lingers in the folds of our skin long after the moment has passed. When viewing these conspicuous paintings, our silhouette molds into its frame, transporting our bodies into an experience the artist has carefully illustrated for us.

— Shameekia Shantel Johnson, 2024