born in Wolfsberg/Carinthia/Austria, 1980

Kevin A.Rausch Painting as View of the World

Only at a first glance do the works of Kevin A. Rausch (born in Carinthia, Austria) attest to a brittle, bleak apocalyptic mood; to desolatedness, grey battlegrounds, catastrophes, isolation, and the appendant weltschmerz. Once one takes a closer look, one can discover ironical associations within the collaged landscape with its strange small figures, set pieces, and animals, crossing the grey-and-white ground shades in a cheerful, colourful, and bold way. Here, weltschmerz is not spared of irony; gloomy predictions dont go without a wink. Behind this charmingly shy coquetry, a serious, straightforward access to painting and drawing, in the sense of an artistic method, consequently developed over the years, is concealed.

Kevin A. Rauschs subtle works, which can be classified between neo-retro and modernity, are convincing due to their melancholic coherence, their fine nuances and layers and, most of all, by their boldly drawn lines. Their aim is not the irruption of a manipulative frenzy in colour, or a move to pure abstraction, but to include refined qualities which are united, forming a distinctive poetic. Sometimes the desire of an inwardly traveller and disrupted figure to settle down is noticeable, even if it is obstructive.

In the collage pieces a landscape of ice, desert, snow, burned earth, arenas of war, industry, as well as rural romanticism unfolds, showing a rather unusual spectrum. This world, where the traces of colour tell of an inner dynamics an an informal and gestural way, is grotesque and romantic, hopeful and at the same time resigned.
Basically, the drawing, with its emotional, sometimes absurd lines, cuts through the painting, resulting in a form of tangibleness, of three-dimensionality which, through the cosmos, on earth, in a humanly archaic form very naturally cuts its way: it marks a departure towards the new, towards a future that is no longer charged with history. In Kevin A. Rauschs pictures there is no freedom without isolation, no uplift (recovery) without fall (doom); their allure is caused by the transcendence of time.

Barbara Baum, Strabag Kunstforum

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