ANTONE KÖNST

Entering into Antone Könst’s practice, one should abandon symbolic terms or the burdens of figuration. The artist usually maneuvers in opposition to narrative or meaning, instead cultivating an ambient hum through formal tools. His painterly jurisdiction thus elicits a “room tone,” one deliberately built from recurrence, erasure, and idea surfing. A certain clarity persists across each pictorial execution, as Könst elides obfuscation in favor of the aforementioned “hum.” In developing this optical system, he seeks aesthetic patterns that establish a pervasive frequency.

It’s a treaty-less practice, marked by drift as opposed to edict. Könst wanders in and out of sentiment—from performance to power—keeping his visual grammar consistent. He’s secure in his domain, though persistently seeks its edges, tests the boundary lines. This is not a means of escape, but a calibration of mindfulness, an attentiveness to how his images arrive and shift. He remains invested in observation rather than allegorical resolution. This language-in-process is built from flowers and figures—animals and strange people tend to dominate the painter’s orbit.

He’s judicious in his handling of referents, following affinities without any fidelity to epoch or genre as a means to sustain an ongoing hunt. There are imports from classical sculpture, medieval architecture, and Dutch canonical painting, as well as vintage cartoons and taxonomical floral photographs. One can likewise find kernels from Milton Avery’s use of color as primary force, or Piet Mondrian’s botanical iterations. Yet, Könst implements these threads with discretion, moved by their notions en route to his operational scheme. Each picture is liberated from its context, gaining autonomy through Könst’s own compositional process. Nothing is taken for granted or cheeky; it’s activated and reactivated within the same pocket of imaginal architecture. The world presses in on the artist; he, in turn, absorbs and reconstitutes it.

Some features reappear in the exhibition Subjects—specifically the evocation of faces and layered floristic forms. Here, amidst a loose iteration of previous concerns, Könst centers performance. The curtseying women are fresh, spurn from the lineage of previous paintings that include musicians, dancers, and jugglers. Könst also hones in on the choreography of genuflection and its staged politics of address. This being-a-subject is an uncomfortable position, its awkwardness rendered in the artist’s latest body of work.

There’s so much activity throughout these compositions. The chromatic density, balletic linework, steady accretion—it all pulsates in a consistent rhythm. Musical vocabulary is therefore invoked often when discussing the practice. In the studio Könst observes this congruency, remarking that, just like a sonic framework, the paintings establish a general field with riffs, variations, and counterpoints circulating throughout. He’s impulsive, quick, and rigorous, conducting a kind of pictorial improvisation. It often comes down to a matter of arrangement, especially in regard to the larger canvases. This scale allows the artist to work through a lot of different ideas in one frame.

In the paintings Fire (Moon Rise) and Fire (Moon Setting), for instance, Könst hones in on the particular experience of seeing through one thing toward another. It’s also about light, contrary to fire’s associations with destruction and violence. A similar “seeing through” effect is echoed in Olive Oyl, the Shelley Duvall portrait that flickers between its final state and the aggregate layers of its making. The textures and colors of the artist frames also reinforce the accumulative nature of Könst’s paintings. One is alerted to the quieter tones buried beyond the top strata of pigments, just as the brushstrokes appear doubled onto the bordering structures.

At base, these are not paintings that “tell” you something, they squirm and gestate between perceptual tempos. Through deposition, wiping away, and revision, Könst manages to eke out a coherent response to a tentative order.