01

released in 1970, the ‚make love, not war‘ hippie glorification ‚zabrieski point‘, michelangelo antonioni’s critical consumerism classic, leaves the explosions of a villa arranged in loops and their hoarded worlds of goods for the joy of detail to the friends of pyrotechnic, elegiacly underpinned by pink floyd’s unerringly psychedelic carousel ride. according to the critic martin seel, these explosion sequences, based on the theories of theodor adorno, symbolise the liberation from their economically overformed purposefulness. a few years later, philip glass, well-known minimalist and owner of one or the other vinyl of the floyd, scores the never-ending relapse of an exploded rocket in the 1982 godfrey reggio classic ‚koyaanisqatsi‘ with the same mixture of malicious joy and civilizational mourning. david buckley, on the other hand, prefers to give the passionately exploding lawyer’s paraphernalia in the opening and closing credits of the robert and michelle king series ‚the good fight‘, for cbs, some cheerfully whistling chamber music, because, it seems, the year 2017 no longer needs any psychedelicizing aspects here.

02

explosion / implosion, the long-haired who are addicted to antonioni’s magical lava lamp and suck heavily on mind-expanding substances stare in fascination at transforming surfaces and when the self-injured protagonist finally roars in a shrieking crescendo (careful with that axe, eugene – the pinks again) the party ends, expressed in the ashtray or as a miserable needle in the already cooling visionary. transformation and transcendence, the two core concerns of art in the middle of the last century, are treated in very different artistic ways. if the interested viewer can still lose himself in mark rothko’s waddily flowing color spaces, in 1974 nam june paik’s video installation ‚tv-buddha‘ refers buddha indelicately to himself. the meditator looks at his meditating image on the monitor; an elegantly undisguised middle finger to all advocates of superficially applied, esoteric make-up. despite all the respect and the blustering power-mongering, the clientele that wants to whisper the end of the iridescent panel simply does not succeed.

03

according to an old jazz musician’s saying, you don’t have to learn what you play, but rather what you leave out. lev khesin’s color palette, sometimes extracted from a wild lsd trip, can nevertheless be certain of one thing; although it may technically correspond to the dull, and often copied, layering achieved with squeegees à la richter, his works follow a completely different mechanics. the use of silicone and its fresh, undried appearance does not create the illusion of space, as is the case with other matt-drying slide and scraper matadors, but creates an actual space instead; the material itself becomes a sculptural picture surface with the aid of various transparencies and pigment admixtures. by virtue of the art of masterful processing, khesin’s promise of moisture seduces us into believing his idea of the world as a square, juicy glass ball on the wall. the ecstatic quality of being able to witness the captured moment of a melting mass of ice cream binds childlike euphoria to these works, just as there are no limits to the viewer’s free power of association in all of the artists findings.

04

daring a cultivated touch of audacity, the main tool used by the artist, the scraper, can be compared to a musical instrument – what could be more obvious than to refer directly and purposefully to the drum in this context, or better, to the idea of percussion as such. the jazz visionary max roach presents a valid interpretative framework here by assigning the percussion the creative possibilities of an entire orchestra. in terms of rhythm, pitch and timbre, it is quite comparable to the processing of a drum kit, for the scraping hand leaves behind the same musically interpretable traces in the material to be processed. although bound in space and time, it remains as a layered, interwoven testimony to a comprehensible process of the enclosed simultaneity of all the gestures performed. here too, the consistency of the silicone used plays a decisive role, corresponding to the sound mastering quality of the recording and mixing of a song. instead of listening to a vinyl record that transparently reproduces the session, here we encounter a workpiece that resembles a drum, whose musical gestural processing reveals itself as its own historical inscription in the material on top.

05

in a time of uncertain change, despite or precisely because of seemingly uncontrolled technical innovations, lev khesin’s showpieces symbolize both a healthy, social opening towards abstraction and at the same time its exact opposite, the unconditional will to find associative figurative trace elements. thus the artist’s sculptural paintings make use of the rich storehouse of psychedelic expressive sashays in order to also renounce the psilocybin of regressive form-finding in favor of a forward-looking vision of pure material. these lusty color packs easily defeat the nft community, even if armed with the most progressive ai support, and when the world runs out of electricity one day, the artist’s lava lamp variants will continue to shine on in full splendor.

martin eugen raabenstein, 2024

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