"Lightness and rightness"

“Mehr Licht” [“More light”] were supposed to have been the last words of Johann von Goethe -- and as Goethe spoke, so Germans think. And feel. As opposed to their Mediterranean brethren, who bask in the light generously apportioned to them as if bathing in water, Northern Europeans hunger for light, cherishing it in its scarcity. What happens, then, when a German artist gravitates to a light filled realm (a move, you might say, equivalent to Goethe’s own Italian travels)? But the luminous local Karl Dietz currently inhabits is not Rome or the campagna, but Los Angeles, with its own peculiar culture and sensibility.

Karl Dietz moved to Los Angeles neither to drag his cultural baggage with him nor to escape his origins and sources, but to replant his aesthetic in new soil. Los Angeles is, in fact, the perfect place to explore and refine Dietz’s kind of Zen Bauhaus. Both physical and the cultural levels, after all, the city trades in illusion: the high, bright sunlight that nurtures the world’s most powerful image industry can also provoke an ongoing crisis of perception in almost any sighted individual, even those born and bred between the stark, mystical desert, the tawny, almost animal like hills, and the deceptively docile sea. With shade and shadows scarce, nuances - the echoes of reality by which people from Berlin to New York to Tokyo apprehend the world - dissolve into pure daylight, or equally pure night. Things are not as they seem in Los Angeles; nor are they otherwise.

“Things are not as they seem...”, of course, is a classic Zen koan, a conundrum around which a mind’s meditation can pivot. But the koan happens to describe precisely the condition of perception in southern California, a condition that prompted the emergence in the 1960s of a whole school of artists, and a condition under which that school’s “perceptualist” sensibility has endured since.

Los Angeles perceptualism was (among other things) a local response to East Coast minimalism, and one sees in the work of New York based minimalists and proto-minimalists, from Barnett Newman to Agnes Martin, the acknowledgment of inherent instability in the process of looking and the condition of seeing. But these artists reached their mature styles more through intellection and inner spiritual exploration than environmental stimulation (although Martin, for one, subsequently sought out such stimulation by relocating to New Mexico). No matter how much these reductivist masters have (by his own admission) influenced Dietz, he has needed to inhabit that instability physically, to be in a place where looking and seeing are neither what they seem nor are otherwise - and where there is a history of such para- and meta- vision, applied to art and artifacture as well as life and entertainment.

It should be emphasized, however, that Dietz’s art operates in ways quite different from that of Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, John McCracken, and other “perceptualist” artists from and in Los Angeles. In its emphasis on color as the basis for optically and conceptually investigating perception, Dietz’s work fact suspends itself between the semi-visible-object approach of “finish fetish” perceptualists, with their emphasis on surface, material, and transparency, and the monochrome “radical painting” practiced by artists (equally in California and Europe - especially Germany) more of Dietz’s own generation.

Transiting to his current art from the rough-hewn work of his student and post-graduate days in Frankfurt and Berlin, Dietz passed through a “radical painting” period - or, rather, skirted it while recapitulating certain aspects of the American minimalism he so admired. Indeed, Dietz’s neo-minimalist geometry's, suggesting (without imitating) such artists as Robert Mangold and Sol LeWitt, were the first paintings he produced upon settling in Los Angeles With these elegant images - most notably a sequence of canvases divided into a downward- facing triangle and the negative spaces it defines - Dietz left behind the eccentric, almost performance oriented structures he produced in Germany for a purer, more centered, self-effacing and ultimately self-sustaining formal vocabulary. Such a vocabulary evinces a meditative focus, and bespeaks a discourse generated more through contemplation than through discussion - the result not simply of the relative isolation Dietz has chosen in Los Angeles, but of the connection to a world that is less understood than sensed, less known than seen.

Dietz´s most radical realization of his modified perceptualism has taken the form of multi panel paintings whose components are hung from, but perpendicular to, the wall. Determining three-dimensional structures, these pieces are immediately comprehended as quasi architectural - not architectural per se, as they serve no function, but participating in topographic and volumetric definitions of body- inhabited space. As each panel bears a single hue, however, the installation paintings participate to an equal extent in the stimulation of purely visual apprehension. The multipartite works thus bridge the gap between optic and hap tic effect.

Dietz´s current body of work, evolving directly from the multi panel paintings, are also wall defined, despite the fact that they are displayed in a more conventional manner, i.e., hung flush with the wall, facing outward. They still engage the wall, if less dramatically than before, as the asymmetric dispositions of rectangular color segments take place suspended between plexiglas sheets. The space between segments-- places that are empty, that are absent of segments - are actual, physical gaps which allow the wall to show through. The wall thus becomes an integral factor in each work. The new paintings are in fact water-colors, which permits Dietz to explore an ever greater variety of graduation - gradation as much of relative density as of hue or tone. Dietz´s color segments range not only from darkest to lightest but from deepest to flattest, most opaque to transparent, densest to most aqueous.

Dietz’s formulations would seem to evince an underlying formula, a system by which colors are subject to myriad gradations and then arranged strategically in logical compositions. In fact, he arrives at his compositions, their coloristic variation and their arrangement alike, entirely through intuitive comprehension and response. This is not an arbitrary, but sensual, approach: Dietz evolves the arrangements of rectangles through his own sense of “rightness” rather than through any concept of sequential propriety. You might say that Dietz´s newest work are determined by a kind of satori, a Zen moment of knowing that results from the interaction of focused study, ambient conditions, and ineffable insight.

This charged moment and its serenely balanced outcome - the artwork - engages artist and viewer in much the same dynamic of knowing and seeing as that impelling the perceptualist artists of California, and equally, albeit somewhat differently, the “radical” monochrome painters working all over the world. The satori of rightness also lies at the heart of classical geometric abstraction from which Dietz, the radical painters, the minimalists and perceptualists all descend. Indeed, it may be that sense of refined moment rather than a mere vocabulary of hard-edge shapes that is the true legacy left by Malevich, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, et. al. The work of Karl Dietz avers as much.

Peter Frank, Los Angeles, 1997