Twillight Man — A Monograph of the New Modern

Image left: 

Inter-communicative self-nude study from the year 2016. 

In this monolinear kalamos shellac-ink study, a fragment 

of the series communicates through the sign of the palm 

of the hand held open toward the spectator 

To comprehend the draftsman Bernhard Karlowitz and the singular position of drawing within his œuvre, 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 well." 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 her.

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, actually?” The principal was forced to concede: "Well, yes...". 

In the era of analogue television—long before the existence of a pause button, digital rewinds, or internet replays—Bernhard captured the unarrested, moving images of the screen. He portrayed presenters and TV stars blindly in real-time while watching the live broadcasts, catching the fleeting expressions of Stefanie Powers and Robert Wagner, Cary Grant, Anna Magnani, Ingrid Bergman, Inge Meysel, or Marcello Mastroianni.

This obsessive practice already manifested his lifelong methodology of drawing directly from transitional movement.

Crucial to the artist's biography is that he was not shaped by a haute-bourgeois academic household or the contemporary art establishment, but rather by the television landscape—then dismissed as fleeting pop culture—the cinematography celebrating “grand art,” and the raw, authentic experience of childhood.

Entirely unadulterated by what the academic world formally codified as "art," his primal understanding fed exclusively on the autonomous reflection of life itself. 

This profound detachment logically accounts for his unconsciously unyielding stance against the conformed art establishment during his subsequent university years.

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.

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Image left: “F*ck the Contrapposto” — Self-nude study from the year 

2024, 50 x 70 cm. A study series that deliberately celebrates the rupture 

of representational tradition without being static. Structured with inwardly 

turned feet, a slightly sunken torso, unheroic, and self-questioning in its 

stance, the figural choreography consciously searches for Modernism in 

the sense of a new, authentic philosophy of representation. The nude is 

executed in a monolinear graphite drawing technique. The line, which falls

uncorrected within the synchronic observational process, shifts seamlessly

from the contour line via the body-circumscribing line to the anatomical 

definition and the plane-defining hatching line. Yet, it remains discernibly 

linear at all times, even within the scribbled hatchings and plane definitions, 

never dissolving. The graphite study, executed in this cézannesque-

monoinstrumental sense, is situated within space by a generous painterly 

hand using broad, black shellac-ink brushstrokes, pushed slightly forward 

in space through the black glaze-valeur-texture interplay. 

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 œuvre 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. 

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Image left: 

Self-portrait study, 2003, on grey study paper, 50 x 70 cm, 

executed in graphite monoline, black ink-valeur glazes, 

chalk and egg tempera. The self-portrait is configured with 

a raised chin and a gaze "from above" at the absolute threshold 

of linear representation: the view of the frontal, elevated chin 

cannot be resolved linearly. The graphic elements emerge 

uncorrected and monolinearly placed, measured within the 

graphically synchronic process of mirror-observation. The ink 

glazes are deployed within the parameters of the graphite 

hatching as a plane-defining instrument, without dissolving 

the style-defining monoline. Two years after his academy 

graduation, Karlowitz experiments with the newly won 

sovereignty of the painter within the domain of drawing. 

The perspective of artistic observation is not static. It does not correspond to conventional, theoretical perspective theory. It must be adapted to the pictorial composition and can only be achieved through a trained eye and an internalized working methodology. It fundamentally incorporates the painter's light, atmospheric, and color perspective. The measurement of the exterior or within space presupposes a complex web of empirical values. 

“It is essential to note that the great innovators of drawing in art were either sculptors or painters. Perceptually, they were not linearly dominated. Thus, the original conception of three-dimensional space and the object-encompassing perception of the observing artist must be understood as the true point of origin for the artist's drawing.” 

This implies that the painter's or sculptor's capacity to comprehend space through area-proportional measurement—while notationally integrating the compositional layout—must serve as a binding component of spatial, depth, and object measurement within the academy of art.Ever since the period when Karlowitz taught drawing—while still an advanced student—his instruction consisted largely of critique rounds, in which he corrected linear errors with Olympian rigor down to the millimeter, exposing the mismeasurements. The critique dialogue itself was dedicated entirely to the expressive task of the monoline's linear modulation: the translation of observational empathy into a seismographically guided, real-time line.The bewilderment among academic colleagues regarding his thematic focus revealed a contemporary environment to the artist that perceived his unyielding certainty as an irritation. This stood in stark contrast to his students, to whom he tirelessly explained, demonstrated, and substantiated that the line must never be pushed or feathered toward its measurement point—that it must never be arrested in its expression merely to alleviate its responsibility for exactitude. 

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The model sessions take place before the mirror in the attic studio, alternating from natural light supported by natural light lamps, which streams through the large skylights into the studio onto the paper, to the pure light situation of the interior illumination that sets in when the daylight fades. The lighting choreography was designed by the artist in such a way that the light direction of the windows is maintained, but—after dusk sets in—falls with less diffusion.The Cadmus sessions were by no means a static painter-model situation. The artistic concept demanded a transitional stance, which, in an impulsive change of posture, symbolizes the stride into action in the sense of a matured decision that comes to execution "now". The artist's question directed at this transitional stance addresses the emotional predisposition of the protagonist: Is it the much-evoked heroism of the fearless, is it the sheer necessity of the situation, or is it the proverbial courage of the desperate that makes the young man Cadmus a hero in his deed?Bernhard Karlowitz does not conceptualize the idea of the transitional movement classically. The upper body or arm movement, or the change of position, are not static configurations within the contrapposto. The model must actually execute the movement mode for every single observational segment. The sessions begin with a crouching position in a squat or on the knees, which leads into a leap into a standing position, whereby the shedding of the lion's skin worn by Cadmus takes place. He faces his heroic trial.In the session on December 4, 2018, the physically and mentally exhausting search for the figurative-graphic expression of form and its correspondence in the line seemed to have been in vain.For the reader who does not draw, it should be mentioned that the artist, acting as his own model, frequently works in positions in which the drawing hand does not impair the remaining bodily choreography. Thus, he can either transform the drawing arm into a gesture at the very end—where the graphite or kalamos is simply not shown and the hand is represented altered—or the drawing arm is brought into a different position and integrated into the graphic matrix subsequent to the observation.This procedure carries a risk, since the drawing rotation of the arm is capable of forcing the shoulder dynamics into a different axis, even with an experienced artist-self-model—a dynamic that one must follow during the course of consolidating the drawing, thereby abandoning the initial choreographical concept; or a correction becomes necessary, or: a new beginning.The alternative methodology—to assume a model position that is "far removed" from the drawing position of the artist, such as lying or crouching as a model and then standing up for each stroke of the drawing to step to the drawing board—complicates the observational process immensely. The observational segments must be briefly stored within the muscle memory of the arm during a role reversal, brought to artistic realization by picking up the drawing tool and changing the position. A pure drawing out of observation, generated "without looking" at the sheet directly from the locked gaze of the painter, is severely hindered or prevented.The enormous mental as well as physical fatigue brings even a graphically—and athletically—trained artist to the limit of the achievable after hours of sessions. 

Note on the artistic tradition and the New Modern of Bernhard Karlowitz:

The classical procedure of representing agitation by freezing a contrapposto position remains largely untouched even in Classical Modernism and Postmodernism. The concept of depicting actual transitional movement finds its realization in the 20th century primarily in photography, which captures the momentum of movement either flash-like with a short lens setting or depicts it as motion blur with a long lens exposure.

In the artist's drawing, the idea of depicting movement traditionally occurs in the rapid gestural sketch, which makes no claim to fully capturing the figure—or it is worked out later, not within the act of observation itself. The idea also finds application in applied drawing, for example in fashion illustration. Here, however, the artistically binding observation of the model is abandoned; the moving figure is constructed with aesthetic predominance.

Karlowitz's concept of movement depiction for the classical form of drawing, in which the conditional connection between the act of observation and drawing defines itself in synchronic immediacy of execution, represents a neo-modern, altered demand on the medium of the artist's drawing and the artist himself.

His neo-modern position builds a communicative bridge to a discourse that extends historically from Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) through Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917) and suffocated in the age of photography. In contrast to this traditional discourse, Karlowitz's conception does not refer to the pictorial idea, but to the inter-procedural individual result of the series, which dictates the continuation of the sessions through formal-linguistic communication, radically discarding artistic authorship in the sense of a neo-modern idea by surrendering the aesthetic, narrative, or ideal concept, transferring it to the process itself. 

 “Regarding the contrapposto problem, it must be emphasized that the musculature that holds a position is not the same that executes the movement dynamically. Certainly, great painters have therefore always worked with the partial observation of the transitional movement, which for a brief moment shows the muscle groups that execute the movement but also characterize it in its dynamics. Michelangelo even demonstrated on his David that a movement is in its inception, announcing itself by showing particular muscles in pre-tension.

However, according to my observation, it must be assumed that the observation of the static contrapposto was the foundation of artistic technique for the majority of artists.

Presumably, in the 20th century, it simply no longer seemed necessary to think about it, since the problem could easily be surrendered to photography and, via the medial detour of photography, also be continued painterly. The premise of the unity of observation and execution was thereby dismantled, however. 

The artistic gaze behind the aesthetic appearance and the physical functionality was thus ‘felled’.” 

But what happened on the day the “Twilight Man” came into being? The artist defiantly decided to end the process “today”, even without a result; decided to define the rupture between daylight and dusk as the absolute deadline. The light switch is taboo today!

The repetitions of the Cadmean approximations in the ink lines—despite the newly won certainty of the line and the newly won routine of the technique—refused to let Cadmus communicatively emerge. What was he? What drove him? What did he feel at the moment of facing the ordeal?—or—before: at the moment of his decision to enter into the movement—perhaps anticipating a primal decision of courage? Perhaps not only “shedding” the lion’s skin, but courage itself? Is the hero an epic hero or someone who simply places his obligation before the risk—even if he is—proverbially shaking in his boots? But does it “nevertheless”?  

Is the sovereign, magnificent David, anticipating the point-blank victory shot, at all acceptable for a truly human, existential moment of confronting the ultimate trial? 

Interesting what Kerényi notes on this: The heros differs from the hero because he might not conquer, but remains consistent in his stance. 

Exhausted by the creative-reflective process and the session that once again seemed to be in vain, the dusk questioned the purpose of continuing the entire artistic endeavor. A moment of silent encounter with the man in the mirror, whose legibility began to dissolve into diffuse, backlit shades. As if he meant to shrug: “What of it?—you are no heros—cannot win—have nothing to lose.”

In the nonverbal comprehension of the unpretentious, unheroic, exhausted, and slumped male figure—who completely refused his aesthetic athleticism and the radiance of the hunger for action, who even refused the contrapposto—before it could even be grasped what the figure might mean, want, or whether merely a bored final stroke would lose itself upon him, a peculiar male nude emerged in the enormous tempo of desperate routine. At the moment of completion, the painter wanted to discard the kalamos once and for all, barely able to find his bearings. Schematically, he saw the first graphic figuration, which seemed to gaze back at him, which seemed to have an urgent matter, saying something—what it was, the artist did not know at that moment; it was merely a riddle. 

 “Drawing is not analytical; drawing is impulsive and intuitive.” 

In the fading light of day, which brought the end of the session with dark force, the painter wrote “Dämmerlicht” [twillight] next to the figuration, signed it, and stumbled out of the studio without turning on the light, without encountering the Twilight Man. 

At this juncture, the author notes that the text's methodological premise—delivering an objective, critical, and formal analysis from a detached third-person perspective—reached a threshold of feasible procedure within those passages documenting the actual execution of the creative act. The inevitable permeability between the role of the recording analyst and the psychophysical subject of investigation, specific to this passage, is hereby formally acknowledged. 

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Title: Twilight Man (Dämmerlicht-Mann)
Series: Drawings on the Metamorphoses according to Ovid, Book III, CADMUS
Technique: Kalamos (reed pen) and shellac ink on Chinese paper (30g)
Overall dimensions: 1000 cm x 97 cm
Dimensions of the cropped fragment: 123.5 cm x 54.5 cm
Year of creation: 2018Genesis of the series: The Cadmus series was created between November 22 and December 4, 2018.
Format detail: The process of the studio sessions unfolds across nearly 30 meters of 30g Chinese paper.

Accompanying literature: The drawings were executed with reference to the heroic narratives by Karl Kerényi (The Gods of the Greeks / The Heroes of the Greeks), the mythological lexicon by Hermann Jens (Mythologisches Lexikon), and Reclam’s dictionary of ancient mythology (Lexikon der Antiken Mythologie), with special attention paid to the preface of the aforementioned work by Karl Kerényi. 

Within the aperture of the mat, the drawing is positioned vertically slightly off-center, somewhat lower than the midpoint. In the horizontal measurement, it is aligned to the right of the vertical center line. Consequently, the left groin of the Twilight Man lies directly at the geometric center of the framing aperture. To the left of the figure, the signature and lines of the adjacent drawing—including several cropped strokes—are visible. Below these, to the left at knee height, as well as on the bottom right and the top center, ink splatters are scattered across the paper. At the top left and beneath the Twilight Man, portions of two other drawings are visible in the crop (a foot above; a head below). To the right, three vertical test strokes are discernible.To the left of the figure, bordering the head, the word “Dämmerlicht” is written/drawn with the kalamos in ink, documenting the immediacy of the working process. The weight-bearing standing leg of the figure is the left. The figure is captured mid-turn, facing the spectator, with both arms bent forward, extending the hands toward the viewer, the left hand held slightly higher than the right. This motion of turning toward the observer is amplified by the elevated right hand, the tilt of the head, and particularly by the dropped shoulder on the side of the standing leg.

Within the framing, the artist intensified this kinetic effect through strategic positioning: at the point of origin of the movement, when the figure was still turned away from the spectator, it occupied the vertical center of the aperture; now, following the execution of the turn, it is situated flush against the left center line. The hands appear to hold or present something, or perhaps something has been lost and is no longer there; they seem on the verge of signifying something gesturally. The torso is unpretentiously slumped, the hip—as if after prolonged standing—fatigued, uneager, and thrust forward. The shoulders denote the rotation of the body: they pull back and downward, signifying something akin to a shrug of “What of it?” or “What do I know?” The head is likewise tilted toward the standing leg. 

A facial expression, captured as if in mid-flight, seems to communicatively challenge the spectator. 

As a form, the drawing is characterized by a long-sustained, extremely rapid, and highly dynamic stroke, which, despite its absolute reduction, leads into sensitively characterized details. Progressing from inconspicuously dry to fluidly wet and dynamic, culminating in accentuating splatters, it appears executed in a single breath—encompassing the entire figure, playing through all possible variations without restraint, akin to the art of scat singing in music.

The kalamos ink drawing betrays the figurative comprehension of the painter: despite detailed, precise moments, the figure appears unconstructed, unplanned, justifying itself entirely from its own form. Remarkable is the application of the kalamos itself. Within a drawing format of over one meter, the kalamos is directed from the free arm of the painter. The predominantly filigree line betrays the tempo of its graphic velocity; the absence of linear accentuations reveals the unarrested detail modulations of physical presence, such as at the base of the clavicle or the edge of the bodily silhouette at hip height. These are details that, within the long-sustained line, perform sharp changes of direction at "sustained velocity" in order to erupt into detailed description. 

Cadmus is understood by Karlowitz as an early or first heros. His heroic deed consists of a foundational act: the founding of the city of Thebes. According to Kerényi, the heros differs from the conventional hero because the former is consistent in following a personally characterizing impulse, rather than by simply conquering. In Karlowitz’s graphic reflection on Cadmus, heroic consistency as an element of understanding does not appear ostensibly heroic; it is potentially subject to doubts about action, the failure of numerous attempts, the futility thereof, and uncertainty therein.The metaphor of the lion’s skin thus appears as an inherently contradictory symbol: courage and the necessity of “putting it on.” Deviating from the conventional discourse, the artist constructs a paradox from the lion’s skin metaphor that places the human dimension of the heros ahead of his idealization. The ritual putting on of the symbol of courage betrays the human dread before the fateful trial. In expanding upon Kerényi’s thought, the focus of the heroic theme shifts from the deed itself to the very moment that is decisively responsible for casting off human hesitation, fear of failure, doubt, and panic—like the lion’s skin—in order to prove Kerényi’s consistency as an unprotected, openly emerging self—not the victory.In the supplementary literature and back-story, Cadmus is always privileged; his heroism is pre-destinately configured, manifesting through his genealogy and his entourage. The trial of his actual readiness for consistency with regard to his foundational task arises from the annihilation of his entourage, which, however, also obliterates his externally visible obligation: a retreat or evasion would remain anonymous! The narrative would simply dry up; there would be no witnesses to cowardice. His resulting heroic deed of confronting the dragon that has killed everyone else ultimately emphasizes the purely ideally motivated necessity and ideal integrity.

In Karlowitz’s interpretation, the Cadmean task describes the trial of the adolescent at the boundary of assuming adult responsibility. The real world, with its terrifying, existential horrors, can trigger in the candidate a return to the protection of the community or an Oedipal escape from responsibility. Cadmus becomes a foundational myth because, for the sake of the foundational idea, he is ready for the decisive responsibility as an adult and the resulting self-sacrifice for the common good. 

In the nudity of the figure, Karlowitz reclaims the classical-antique tradition of bodily-symbolic representation. It symbolizes the universally human-existential dimension of his poetic reflection on Ovid's narratives—standing in stark contrast to the religiously transfigured tradition of representation and its elementally implied concepts of guilt and shame, which constitute its constructed moral dimension. 

The drawing “Twilight Man” signifies Karlowitz’s ideal-painterly approximation of the form of drawing. His technically classical-disciplined, yet gestural-intuitive stylistic synthesis demonstrates the classical orientation of his modern painterly attitude. Within its inception, the drawing—through serial repetitions of work—attains an actively formative role at a certain juncture, just as the picture, within the working conception of modern painting, can force the artist into passivity, rendering him its mere fulfiller.Thus, within the series, the drawing begins to demand alterations through its figurative-expressive-communicative quality, generating a potentially intellectual or poetic process of understanding and configuration. In terms of representation, the figure remains mostly more reserved than in the poetically-reflective drawings of Modernism or the aestheticized depictions of antiquity. It is not theatrically conceived, nor physically expressive, but rather communicatively subtle. Its communication arises more from a shrug or a grimace, from defiance or a manifested incomprehension of a movement or gesture, which is implied, rendered casual, and left unexplained through a subtle, at times casual and insolent lineation.Within the Cadmus series, the “Twilight” drawing signifies the point at which the heros integrates the stance of the questioning, potentially hesitating, or resigning figure into his personaggio. Strictly speaking, the “Twilight drawing” is therefore not yet a central component of the Cadmus series; it initiates it.

Within the artist’s œuvre, the Twilight Man denotes the moment where drawing is integrated as an independent element of his creation. Concurrently, it articulates Karlowitz’s singular positioning as a draftsman operating within a painterly stance—a positioning that materializes directly within the stroke of the Twilight Man. 

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