by Jeffrey Grunthaner, studio photos by Olivia Noss // Aug. 16, 2024
Dylan Solomon Kraus has recently changed studios. Tucked away in a busy, industrial building, near where Charlottenburg meets the Westhafenkanal, he invites me up to his new space and cautions that he doesn’t have much to show at the moment. Numerous paintings in progress line the walls of his studio. Compared to when I visited last year, many of these are smaller works, roughly about the scale of an oversized book cover. But there are also a number of unfinished large-scale paintings. I’m immediately drawn to one piece directly opposite one of the studio’s two couches: a maelstrom of sunset hues shot through with fantastical blues and pinks. I ask Kraus why it so neatly faces the couch and he explains that he likes to sit with and contemplate a painting while he figures out what to do with it. By now, he’s already mentioned German abstract painter Blinky Palermo several times, noting how Palermo used color as a dimensional attribute, enhancing the spatial, object-like character of his works. The colors in Kraus’ larger painting already emanate a new quality compared with what he was showing about a year ago at Peres Projects. That show was influenced by zodiac relationships as much as naturalistic observation of animals, plants and sources of light. “Is there any kind of theme emerging so far?” I ask, noting a translucent yet angular adumbration of lines cutting across the canvas. “Frustration,” he quips.
A new studio signals many things for an artist, regardless of their medium. Kraus, being a painter, has to consider things like lighting—when to place a work closer to the one large window where natural light streams in from the outside. There’s also the pragmatics of space: storage is one concern in this respect, but the scale of the works artists can develop also depends on the space they work in. Kraus’ previous studio, located in the same building, was much more sizable, and permitted him to work on multiple large-scale works simultaneously. Here, he likes to keep things comparatively small. This ties in with his vision for the new works. They don’t need to be large; they need to radiate color in bold and apostrophic ways.
Kraus shows me one small-scale piece he’s working on, which is possibly close to finished. The painting features four bluish white circles, darkened like illustrations of the moon in successive phases. There’s something almost diagrammatic about the image, as though an ancient alchemical text merged with a 19th century farmer’s almanac. Even in this quite diminutive scale—no larger than the computer screen I’m looking at now—there’s a haunting quality about the work. Kraus’ paintings often have this ancestral, archetypal aspect about them. They remind you of something primordial about the mystery of consciousness, the act of perception itself—similar to the way celestial bodies have entranced humankind from prehistory until now.
As the photographer arrives and the studio visit gets underway, I’m already a little bit entranced by the small print of an Eastern Orthodox icon he has hanging on a wall. I point this out, by way of introduction, and also call attention to a small portrait painted by Kraus’ new (however informal) assistant—the teenaged son of the owner of his favorite Italian restaurant, located near his studio—which appreciatively reflects Kraus’ tutelage. I also comment on a makeshift pine cone-and-axe assemblage found near the entrance of the studio, perched on top of a fuse box. Earlier, Kraus had told me the meaning of this congeries of objects: “One is about nature, the other is practical!”
Artists, not unlike actors, often need symbols to encourage them in their roles. And while Kraus’ work might readily fall under the rubric of visionary, the naturalism underlying his paintings could be lost sight of if not for reference to the objects he chooses to surround himself with. Kraus’ work stems from nature and, in a highly contemplative, almost Rimbaudian sense, seeing. Rather than engaging in sheer abstraction, or aligning with any of the theories commonly associated with abstraction, Kraus cultivates an open, welcoming attitude towards whatever themes and figures crop up as he’s painting. His pictures emerge, if not quite unexpectedly, then after a long period of reflective gazing into the potentials a work seems to suggest. When I ask him how he feels about Kandinsky’s ‘The Spiritual in Art,’ he shrugs off the question. If anything, Kraus is rather like a draftsman, outlining the spiritual equivalent of attitudes and tendencies sheltered by the darkness of modernism and its melancholic encomiums to technique.
At one point during our visit, I was especially impressed by his use of a compass to mark out circles—a shape which figured heavily in several of his works in progress. The Masonic connotation of the instrument eluded me at the time, but it’s no secret that Kraus has painted cities—sometimes taking the ruined features of Pompeii or Herculaneum as inspiration. The movement from compass-perfect circles to the construction of cities derives, at least partly, from his time at Cooper Union. While an undergraduate, his curriculum encouraged him to experiment not only with paints and pigments, but with elements of design as well: form as much as function. The tools specific to art could readily translate into design, architecture, building. In Kraus’ work, there’s a tension between landscape and form—the imagery portrayed on the canvas, and the geometrical way in which it’s rendered—that most certainly derives from the materials he puts to use. Freemasonry aside, the compass has and will always represent good, sturdy draftsmanship: another aspect of invaluable significance which features prominently in Kraus’ work.
Somewhere between draftsmanship and painting, Kraus’ artistry occupies its own crepuscular plane of craftsmanship. Visiting his studio, one is impressed not only by his proletarian work ethic, but by how effectively his concepts translate into visual terms. It’s very rare for an artist—a painter, in particular—to effectively merge different disciplinary fields. Kraus is working across draftsmanship, architecture and painting, in a way that essentially ties in with symbolism, along with all the metaphysical implications that stem from this.
