On Wanting to Grow Horns: The Little Theater of Tom Knechtel
April 16 ö June 15, 2003

Organized by the Gallery of the Otis College of Art and Design, this exhibition presents a 20-year survey of the works of California artist Tom Knechtel, one of Los Angelesâ most original voices. For over two decades, his idiosyncratic paintings and drawings have transformed the refinement and virtuosity of Renaissance "realism" ö with its passion for both nature and the allegorical -- into modern existential struggles and celebrations. Giving us the lyricism of nature as well as its fall into Bosch-like repulsion, Knechtelâs province has been the grotesque and the ravishing, the intimate and the spectacular, the jubilant and the melancholic. His is a literary, poetic consciousness filled with the stuff of language: metaphor, rhyme, character and narrative. But as a visual artist, he is equally in love with formal values, the raw material of paint and the rigors of scrupulous technique.

Knechtelâs sensibility and iconographical interests have been informed by his passion for theatrical experiences based on wonderment and artifice (Theatre du Soleil, Kabuki, wrestling, puppetry, circuses and masks), as well as by the narrative and spatial conventions of manuscript illustration and the charms of eighteenth-century zoological prints. His fertile swellings and entanglements derived from the botanical world (mushrooms, gourds, tendrils, root systems, roundels of fruits and flowers) fuse decorative and psychological power. Recent paintings, which developed out of an extended visit to Southern India, are a riotous conflation of private fantasy and the stylized, colorful spectacle of traditional Kathakali theater.

Known for the bravura technical virtuosity and range of his small works on paper, Knechtel has explored the media of watercolor, gouache, pastel, charcoal, silverpoint, graphite and ink, in each case maintaining a pure relationship between method and mark-making language. In 1985, in a desire to loosen a punctilious technique, Knechtel began to paint with oils. He has since become exuberantly polyglot in his imagery, juxtaposing styles, divorcing figuration from Renaissance space, playing with scale and multi-point perspective, and embracing continuous narration. These illusionist but non-naturalistic oil paintings set forth labyrinthine and meandering narratives in which meaning is constructed through the process of making. The works constantly delight both artist and viewer with their tension between profusion and restraint, their visual contradictions and surprises.

The presentation of this exhibition at The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, is made possible in part by Lorrin and Deane Wong; The State Foundation on Culture and the Arts; American Airlines; ASTON Waikiki Beachside Hotel; and Horizon Lines LLC.