The artist’s interest in the technical varieties of printing and experimentation with new creative processes is clear in the work Spic & Span in June and July, 2019, part of a larger series made with graphite on paper and canvas. Kaabi-Linke here confronts the principle of immediacy, visually translating evolutions of time and space. The individual works are, in fact, the representation of the transitory nature of the months, and the innumerable declinations of the randomness and fluidity of time. They seem like portraits of instantaneous temporal moments, frozen in the time, captured and then returned. The work is no longer just an artistic object, it becomes a gesture, the trace of a human presence, of the artist’s hand. Although not clearly visible, the cathartic creative force recalls “human landscapes”, fragments of lived lives, evocations of the changing intensities of the present.
– Silvia Cirelli (Curator)
Prateek Raja on the ongoing Spic & Span series
Spic & Span, 2016, is part of an ongoing process of creating twelve variations of graphite drawings on silk paper and canvas, each of which is linked to a month or season in the year. Kaabi-Linke reflects upon her own practice of printmaking. The exercise facilitates an understanding of whether a real-time painting or drawing is even possible. In the process of creating, individual aspects of each variation of the work lie in the very nature of its origin and the evolutionary process of the piece itself. In the end, each drawing relates to both time and space through the activity of filling a period of time until the surface satisfies the conditions that end this process.
Kaabi-Linke performs this temporally determining process as a reduction that highlights the physical conditions that usually carry drawings, paintings, forms, and contents. Following the paper’s wrinkles, the artist’s last and only decision is the acceptance to end the process when the moment seems to be right.
— Prateek Raja (Experimenter)
