here comes trouble / Spencer Brownstone Gallery, 2019, New York City, US
John Yau: I think that where Korneffel has really started making her own place is in her use of color. The blues and pinks seem hers, if one can say such a thing. Finally, rather than pursuing her connection to Heilmann, I found myself thinking of Jerry Zeniuk, a painter who is too little known in the United States, and his fields of multicolored dots. Although it is very early in Korneffel’s development, she has moved into a territory where color and materiality outweigh discursive content. She is interested in paint and color and their connection to real but unnamable feelings. That signals that she is not a conformist and is not trying to fit in an art world where neatly packaged content is a prized commodity. I think Korneffel is an artist to keep an eye on. read more
John Yau: In the nearly square painting, “4 Apples” (2018), Korneffel has drawn for four irregular red circles on a pale maroon ground. If you look long enough, you see traces of an electric green peering through. Unexpectedly, what appears to be a painting that can be quickly grasped has slowed down our gaze. We are not looking at four circles but four isolated gestures, each of which is different from the others. Despite the narrow range of color, it is difference rather than similarity that is central to the viewer’s experience of the painting. read more
Press release:
“Uh Oh.”
Highly personal concept. Bright, vivid, colors. Amorphous, primal formation of shapes. And a resistance to canon or categorization.
Korneffel’s Sunset is a large, acrylic on canvas with a light blue background and three round blots of paint in navy blue, pink, and purple. Despite its perceived simplicity, her work is about the color of air, Grand Unification Theory, childhood memories and future visions, a mathematician father, the frescoes of Fra Angelico, infinity, and apples. A closer look at the painting reveals two or three additional blots and a strata of color along the edge. Working towards a final pic- ture, she freely conjures images and just as freely washes over them to create layers space. Waves of meaning ebb and flow through this process and new ideas emerge in their
intersections.
“here comes trouble”
-can be heraldic and idiomatic. Like all idioms, it has meaning that is not deducible by the words provided alone. It also signals the arrival of trouble, whether or not we perceive the comer to actually be trouble.
