Erik Koch

Extract from the book AN ART OF OUR OWN-THE SPIRITUAL IN TWENTIETH CENTURY ART from Roger Lipsey, Ph.D. à propos d'erik koch.

An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art

"The drive to change and amaze, as Bailey put it, has been quietly ignored by many gifted artists, who find their study and pursue it through thick and thin. Erik Koch is one such, a Danish artist now living in France, who studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown in the years around 1950. Koch has done everything that he should not have done. In years when massive paintings were the norm and paintings of moderate size were considered unsure, he became for the most part a miniaturist. His diminutive works (Fig.117), measuring often five inches square or less, could not have been more out of step. In the decades when the marketplace was thriving successively on dramatic Abstract Expressionist works, the cheerful commonplaces of Pop Art, the retinal assaults of Op Art, the expensive austerities of Minimalism, and the imposing impasto of Neo-Expressionism, Koch was simply not on board. He had a vision that was not of the marketplace, and he persisted in it. This was a miserable business strategy, but his art was very good and remains so.

In historical perspective, Koch's art is a meditation on the pictorial discoveries of Matisse and Mondrian. The colour-poems, as he calls his decades-long series of miniatures, explore the infinite range of color and color relations through the simple compositional device of a variable grid. He may dynamize the grid into a highly irregular pattern, as in the illustrated work, or treat it plainly as sets of intersecting perpendiculars; in either case, the focus is color itself. The results are often nothing short of ravishing. Like the ragas of Hindu music they are tone poems reflecting the intrinsic qualities of moments and places. Their frequently literary titles tie them to the artist's experience, as if they are the distillate of changing circumstances.

Simple as they are, and asking only to please by taking the viewer into and ordered and sensuous world, they nonetheless have rather complex intellectual and spiritual roots. The thought behind them is Mondrian's concept of pure plastic art, and beyond that P. D. Ouspenski's Tertium Organum, which Koch has long admired. The colour-poems are Koch's solicitations, day after day, year after year, of an awareness that reaches past the obvious to a more fundamental awareness, aesthetic and spiritual. What Schmalenbach wrote of Julius Bissier's colored miniatures can be said here: the colour-poems are a «book of hours», an intimate diary in pictorial form.