In the suggestive correspondence between American poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, the latter, recounting the particular bond with epistolary writing, states, among other things, how «writing letters is always dangerous, in any case – fraught with threats»[1]. Similarly, this is what characterizes the painter Pesce Khete (Rome, b. 1980) who approaches pictorial research in the same way as a writing exercise: executed on paper, with supports arranged horizontally, always starting from one verse to proceed freely and ascending toward the entire available surface. Paradoxically, with such modes, the total triumph of the rules inferred from writing practice lead the artist elsewhere, to the point of pursuing an action that no longer has anything to do with such principles.
Pesce Khete, “OLDIES but GOLDIES”, installation view at COLLI, Roma, ph. credit Roberto Apa, courtesy the artist and COLLI
Thus, Khete’s solo exhibition, which can be visited at COLLI in Rome, entitled OLDIES but GOLDIES, curated by Cecilia Canziani, on view until July 31st, 2024, is an authentic demonstration of a painter acting by opportunistic actions, well understood to mean as the need to work without prerogatives, according to instantaneous opportunities, without any predetermination, doing only what is deemed appropriate to do in the moment of creation. Moreover, what is in the exhibition proposes the artist’s work differently than usual: the papers, in fact, are not unrolled from the ceiling to the ground, but rather regularly hung and framed in the absence of glass. Nonetheless, considering the uncertain component of Khete’s practice, which keeps the work as an open field, it is noteworthy how much the proposed set-up turns out to be far too balanced, so that the installation homogeneity could have been counterbalanced with the unpredictability of additional elements.
Pesce Khete, “Untitled”, 2024, oil painting, oil stick, acrylic and silicone on cotton paper, 77 x 140 cm, ph. credit Roberto Apa, courtesy the artist and COLLI
However, the artist in pursuing an active and vibrant imagination along with a natural and simple adherence to the most basic rules of writing, brings forth a painting that captures variably controlled impulses, sporadically tracing confusingly recognizable figures. Therefore, Khete, whose hand works on par with a whirlwind in the open air, naturally delineates tumultuous associations, collecting scraps and remnants of colors that orient and unfold in the logic of an empty sheet with minimal fixed visual coordinates. In this regard, from what the artist says, the practice of drawing has a fundamental value in this process, which allowed him to naturally orient himself in the empty spaces of the paper support. Surely from this derives his ability to be able to handle painting as an automatism, which playfully does not hinder, balancing instead the free surrender to the deepest forces by letting them emerge in a shapeless and capricious tangle. It goes without saying that we have to to study the works in the exhibition as open forms so that the more they are devoid of figuration the more animated and vibrant they turn out to be, it remains even more appropriate to consider them as an opening to an imaginary in which paper does not support, but rather reveals a dangerous writing, as impulsive and pregnant with otherwise unattainable meanings. Moreover, the artist does not slide toward a figurative hedonism, not least because the cards turn out to be insoluble enigmas, in which different energies meet, some dark and some still variably luminous.
Pesce Khete, “Untitled”, 2024, oil painting on cotton paper, 76 x 140 cm, ph. credit Roberto Apa, courtesy the artist and COLLI
Therefore, what emerges from the exhibition project is the constant workings of a whirlwind that sometimes takes the strokes out of orbit, so that the paper stands as a sea without boundaries, in which experimentation, risk and a convinced inclination to research meet. In this oscillation of identity, Khete expresses the sense of a stubborn adventure towards an inexplicable thickening of thoughts and writings in freedom, so that each trace opens breaches towards convulsive scenarios, until introducing us into authentic and unexpected states of mind. Moreover, in the emptiness of the paper traced by the hand of clumsy marks, the breath of the wind that moves the whirlwind of the artist’s hand, in addition to collecting the resulting waste, displaces traces, thus outlining suggestive tears, for which the pictorial matter is equal to a give to spare, synonymous with a disjointed attitude that fragments rather than unites. So that the forms cut by Khete suggest physical posture toward the support, for which he works the beloved paper horizontally, with a mixture of respect and nonchalance, taking at times only a few shreds of his own world, to create autonomous territories, floating, transient, immobile forms, augmented as expressive forms.
Pesce Khete, “Untitled”, 2024, oil painting and oil stick on cotton paper, 68.5 x 23 cm, ph. credit Roberto Apa, courtesy the artist and COLLI
Thus, Khete’s is a direct contact with the world, a not surrendering to the dangerousness of his writing, to voluntarily embrace the search for a laceration as the only interpretive design that intends to trace back to a single element: the formless. Therefore, there is no doubt the specific relationship with colors capable of creating a fascinating disequilibrium, particularly in the only vertical work on show, in which there is a splendid alternation of the use of yellow, present in the shades of cadmium, sulfur typical of the traces of zinc, capable of creating in the whole a fascinating disequilibrium. It seems clear, therefore, that the artist’s intention is to reduce to the point of eliminating the inessential element, and in fact in the other papers only a few coloristic modulations have well-founded value: the tender and acid tones of orange and the radiant hypnotic charm of the materiality of greens. Khete’s is a practice, in other words, in which one finds the most advanced pictorial risk, where one catches meditations and grooves of a pictorial writing that gushes on par with an intense and nourishing flow. A doubt as an almost reckless act, a very concrete doing in which moments of stillness and moments of tension alternate. For Khete, ultimately, painting amounts to the need to master the requirements of an extremely risky writing, slashing at certainties and only seemingly chaotic.
Maria Vittoria Pinotti
[1] Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Scrivere lettere è sempre pericoloso, Adelphi, 2014, p. 246
Info:
Pesce Khete. OLDIES but GOLDIES
curated by Cecilia Canziani
08/05/2024 – 31/07/2024
COLLI
Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday from 3pm to 7pm
Via di Monserrato, 103 Roma
https://www.colli-independent.com/
Maria Vittoria Pinotti (1986, San Benedetto del Tronto) is an art historian, author, and independent critic. She currently is the coordinator of Claudio Abate’s photographic archive and Manager at Elena Bellantoni’s Studio. From 2016 to 2023 she was the Gallery Manager in a gallery in the historic center of Rome. She has worked with ministerial offices such as the General Secretariat of the Ministry of Culture and the Central State Archive. Currently, she collaborates with cultural sector magazines, focusing on in-depth thematic studies dedicated to modern and contemporary art.
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