Where memories live

It is impossible not to associate Kilian Glasner’s work with black and white. A home built with tonal values, neutral colors. Admirable nostalgias perpetuated by streets and cities until then only inhabited by a mysterious void. A dense white obscuring the paper like fog.

The masters at Beaux Arts in Paris influenced his work as much as the period of more than eight years wandering, not belonging anywhere. Splendid views were drawn by the artist that has become longing. He absorbed figments of imagination and made them truth in his paintings.

“The form of the world into which a person is born is already inborn in him as a virtual image,” said Carl Jung. This is the chimeric image we see in Kilian’s works. The artist does not choose his gaze upon the world, but he is capable to store in his unconscious the correlations that already exist but that others rarely notice.

In the “Noite clara, dia escuro” [Clear night, dark day] exhibit, the artist interrupts 15 years of black and white and returns to color at the same time he finds his home, away from big cities, in Gravatá-PE. The scenario of the new drawings resemble science fiction: three lighthouses indicate the time of departure. From the flight deck of an airplane, in the work “Horizonte Artificial” [Artificial Horizon], we see the city lights. This same plane seems to have left the airport in the work “turbulência” [turbulence], from 2012, to finally land, remaining on firm ground. The path continues with the headlights of cars that combine with the glow of dusk and the starts that combine with fireflies. From the window, spectators contemplate what the artist saw, without having to go through the same path he followed, they are far, protected by the walls that prevent us from dissipating in the vastness of the land.

With charcoal, pastel, acrylic and oil paints, Killian builds his language: images filled with beauty, perplexity and wonder. Every place and object pictured are part of his home, some close to the eyes, in the serene landscape of his refuge in Gravatá-PE; others inhabit the never-ending sounds of his imagination. Between reality and fiction, the artist proposes different ways to see the universe and, thus, he gradually takes possession the things he paints, stealing them from the world, changing their initial condition to, at last, give back to the spectators realities potentiated by his ingenuity.