Twilight Man — A Monograph of the New Modern

To comprehend the draftsman Bernhard Karlowitz and the singular position of drawing within his oeuvre, it is essential to illuminate the origins of his graphic language. As a young child, the future painter refused for a long time to speak to anyone except his mother, prompting visitors to suspect she was spinning fairy tales when she claimed that Bernhard could "hear and understand perfectly normally." Instead, the child was intensely observant, scrutinizing relatives and guests with a critical gaze, remaining detached—and mute. Driven by the conviction that a child deserves every available means of self-expression, his mother handed him drawing pencils and paper: in that instant, the communicative path into the world was broken open. Bernhard Karlowitz drew everywhere and at all times: sketchpads, newspapers, journals, brochures, wallpaper, and furniture. Whether visiting the doctor or traveling by car, his mother always carried his sketchpads and pencils with him.

Already in primary school, Bernhard was called upon by classmates to draw their favorite animals or cartoon heroes; during lower secondary school, his high-caliber caricatures of the faculty triggered a veritable scandal. They appeared highly provocative to the teachers, not only because of their unyielding transmission of the subjects' behavioral quirks, but also because their likeness was unmistakable. When the school principal summoned Bernhard’s father to a meeting, demanding to know why a specific teacher had to be depicted in "such a manner," the father replied: "I don't know the lady myself—but normally, my son captures the people he draws very accurately... well, does she not look like that?" The principal was forced to concede: "Well, yes..." In the era of television, Bernhard captured the moving images of the screen, portraying presenters and TV stars blindly while watching the broadcasts; in everyday life, he drew relatives and houseguests alike. The sketchpads piled up. 

As the adolescent increasingly seemed confronted with the realization that he had internalized his calling within drawing, he participated in the customary courses. Already here, Karlowitz was deeply unsettled by the prevailing practice. Drawing within the amateur and semi-professional market was dominated by the notion of a pleasing execution of effects. The young painter, beginning to recognize his own idiosyncrasies, perceived the instruction to soften a line, to feather it away, or to even smudge and rub it—submerging it into an obscure realm that diminished its commitment—as fundamentally wrong from the very outset. His stroke was always hard and precise—or it missed the mark—then he began anew. The hatching followed the momentum of the open arm, never a merely aestheticizing cross-direction.

It was his older sister who ultimately declared: "You are so talented—you MUST build a portfolio." Karlowitz learned the classical object, spatial, and figurative measurement of the painters, executed with an outstretched arm, and finally received the corrective to underpin his own claim to a specific mastery of the method, technically supporting and demanding more from his freely trained eye-measurement. For the sake of the precisely executed monoline.

In the article on the graphic "Orpheus Series" (2012), you can read how the drawing style of the applicant Bernhard Karlowitz provoked absurd reactions from a bewildered academic establishment when he applied for admission to academies both at home and abroad. This experience led the twenty–one-year-old to renounce drawing altogether as a student, in order to avoid further humiliation, irritation—and responses of any kind. It was a decision that would prove fundamentally decisive for the purely painterly style of the future tempera painter.

Instinctively understanding that the dominant draftsman within him would block the path toward a pure, autonomous painterly form, the 21-year-old student surrendered himself entirely to the handling of space, the discourse of color, and chromatic-gestural expression. He had tasted blood.

Semester after semester, old friends and studio visitors could no longer comprehend his world. Why had the young, figurative painter, who had already created complex works with chalk and acrylic based on graphic figuration, abandoned his obvious "talent"? Why did he choose instead to juxtapose and layer seemingly muddy, smeared fields of color upon canvases that—from their perspective—promised no discernible value?

A rare exception to this graphic abstinence was a studio newspaper produced by hand in a limited edition during an all-night studio session in 1995 by the class for “New Painting (+ Media)” under Professor Rolf Lobeck. It contained original works, thick splashes of paint that warped the booklet, short pamphlets on art, and a Chupa Chups tongue-painting lollipop that actually and intensely stained the readers' mouths—an avant-garde intervention that turned the consumer of the paper into the pictorial carrier of a subversive painting action by the Lobeck class.

In the dilemma of which contribution by the supposedly miserable new painting student could be featured in the newspaper, someone spotted the scribbled drawing of a Great Dane, thrown down with a blue Edding marker in a single line across a page of the HNA newspaper, right over the background of the page's printed articles. Bernhard Karlowitz had apparently wanted to explain an everyday situation during a casual conversation and had drawn the dog in one continuous line with an Edding that happened to be lying around. "We can definitely use that, it’s quite good!" was first remarked by Arnold von Wedemeyer, the senior classmate. The others agreed. Bernhard was sweating blood. The dilemma was resolved. 

This monolinear Edding Great Dane became Karlowitz’s very first published presentation piece as an art student.

Within his studio work, Bernhard concentrated exclusively on pure painting, its valeurs, chromatic interaction, and the gesture. As a rigorous painterly stance, the student of the Lobeck class navigated the minefield that rose before him as an unspoken falsification dilemma: the sheer incompatibility between the concept of the Informel permeating the class, and his own devotion to the classical figurative heritage and its sujets. The hostility of postmodern academia toward form, classical sujets, and indeed any predominant concept of material and form altogether—combined with the painterly dead end of postmodern styles and their theoretical structures—seemed to leave absolutely nothing that was paintable.

Bernhard Karlowitz attended the nude drawing seminar in the class of Professor Kurt Haug solely to maintain drawing as a pure medium of training, devoid of any pretension toward a formal art.

Professor Kurt Haug was one of the painters of a contemporarily established movement, Photorealism, who nevertheless recognized the painterly experiment of Professor Rolf Lobeck’s »Lagermaler-Klasse« (the German word “Lager” signifies the artist’s situation within a camp, alluding to creative seclusion or the exiled artist as such). Professor Kurt Haug constructively and encouragingly supported the early painting of Bernhard Karlowitz, even though the diametric opposition to the Photorealism of his own class was evident from the very beginning.

In the nude drawing seminar, the young student focused entirely on the precision of measurement and the strictest possible reduction of the line. He drew in numerous series using a ballpoint pen, in order to suppress any possibility of the line escaping precision, be it even the blurring of linear modulation. The astonishment that the correct measurement of the model did not even seem to be part of the academic curriculum was something he had to neutralize through a radical concentration on himself.

In Karlowitz’s study of drawing, which bore a purely training character and claimed no aesthetic pretensions, it was actually only about one thing: the monoline, unerringly precise. 

Recurring critique comments from the student assistant, which pervaded the nude drawing class as an auditory soundscape — suggesting that one could "achieve great effects here and there with shading" so that the drawing would "work much better" even if the line was inaccurate, caused the student—who, once again, remained mute—to lose his breath.

Why should one do something incorrectly only to submerge the mistake into a beautiful effect?

An alternative drawing class at the art academy focused on the detailed execution of a nude within a classical studio setting under half-dark lighting, highly concentrated and patiently rendering graphic works, when Bernhard Karlowitz tested its waters. Since he regarded the application of shading techniques and the elaboration of the lighting situation as mere industrious drudgery—feeling almost akin to purely applied drawing—and since the training of medial transmission within the act of observation was his sole objective, he remained with his training in the Haug class and—outside the studio — away from the academy, in front of the mirror in his shared apartment or in the kitchen: he drew self-portraits, nude self-studies, cups, pots, pans, and radios, or, from the roof of the building at the corner of Breitscheidstraße and Friedrich-Ebert-Straße: the view over the west of Kassel including Bebelplatz. He worked with graphite, Edding, charcoal, and colored pencils.

In his first exhibition in 1998, which programmatically bore only his name and the title "Painting 1998" at the "Galerie im Hölkeschen Haus" on the Weinberg in Kassel, Bernhard Karlowitz exhibited the portrait of a friend, "Jens in Blue-Green," inspired by the chromatic alienation of incarnat within the modern portraiture of the early Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941), and Henri Matisse (1869–1954). 

Furthermore, a Mediterranean "Still Life with Wine Carafe and Dolmadakia" on a plate—executed on canvas in a cleanly glazed, discreetly gestural tempera manner—and chromatic-abstract figurative objects within the pictorial color-space were shown.The portrayed friend, photography student Jens Albrecht, captured flawless studio prints with his old, "sacred" Rollei camera, which were developed in a specialty shop for handmade prints at Bebelplatz. Bernhard Karlowitz ordered 20 sets of these prints, typed the titles onto large white sheets of paper using the studio typewriter, folded and hand-stitched twenty booklets, and crafted grooved cardboard boxes that he covered with his own painter's canvas, where in turn the words "Bernhard Karlowitz — Painting 1998" were forcefully pounded into the fabric by the typewriter. Patrons who had enabled his path up to this point received a copy of this edition, inclusive of a drop of blood from the arduous stitching through the thick cardboard during the night before the vernissage.

As described in the article on the graphic "Orpheus Series" (2012), Bernhard Karlowitz returned to drawing only after ten years of independent artistic practice. The fear that the draftsman within him might corrupt his painting had not vanished, but it had become manageable. Previously, drawing had never been part of his formal-critical artistry. His instinct for the purpose of artistic expression, the pictorial concept, and the form of art—the maturity of his art as a whole—constituted itself entirely from a painterly intuition. The first attempt to artistically domesticate the raw, wild child of the past was the law of the monoline, executed by the trained, free arm of the painter with the kalamos reed pen in hand. Painterly elements were intended to support solely through targeted monochrome glazes; they were never permitted to serve as an aesthetic or formal crutch. In training, the monoline had to stand completely alone, relentlessly crying out even the slightest erroneous stroke. 

Wherein lies the absolute exceptionalism of Bernhard Karlowitz's artistic biography? A brief explanation is required to illustrate this. Many painters define form partly in a flat, chromatic manner, but also linearly. Within the language of painting, linear formal discourse is unpainterly, since the line instrumentally must be designated as artificial. It is a linguistic form, a system of letters. Pure painting is based on the original visual and general perceptual awareness of human beings. Therefore, an infant can comprehend painting, whereas a young child cannot comprehend a drawing: one must first "learn" the language. The line is thus the evolutionary cultural symbol of humanity's stride into the capacity to develop visual language systems that denote that the human being is observing in an object-focused manner. He recognizes objects and outlines them in the act of recognition—he marks them perceptually. Painting, by contrast, is based on non-investigative observation. It does not seek to isolate, understand, or name objects. 

 "The concept of painting reflects itself in a wonderful and wondrous way in the philosophy of Parmenides of Elea, his journey of enlightenment to the goddess Dike, and his Popperian observation of the moon, which was later continued by Socrates and Plato. The desire for physiognomic recognition denotes a claim of possession or a claim of knowledge by the human being who recognizes, names, and possesses. The idea of perceiving without wishing to recognize, name, and possess is precisely Parmenidean in this sense: the approach to truth occurs under the premise of ultimately being unable to grasp it. One can see things without understanding them—without possessing them through recognition. In this sense, the line is investigative and intellectual; it bears an epistemic character and asserts a denotative claim. The blending of line and chromatic surface is therefore not merely a formal-linguistic game of variation; it represents a fundamental decision by the artist." 

The decision to cultivate the line as a linguistic form under the premise of the artistic supremacy of painting within the oeuvre forces the line out of its original form and into an experience-open medium—into a seismogram of the observational impulses of the painter's eye. 

The author addresses the interpretation of Parmenides articulated by Sir Karl Popper (1902–1994) in his work “The World of Parmenides”. According to this view, the ancient cosmologist becomes the founder of the essential approach to epistemology, from which a distinct philosophical stance originates. By reclaiming the classical unity of the sciences, arts, and philosophy, Karlowitz integrates art as a consequent science of the Parmenidean discourse directly into the Popperian context.