The 40 Seasons John Kleckner

 

"Had Albrecht Durer made the storyboards for Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre one might have an easy portal for entering the practice of John Kleckner. An archival knowledge of how flesh dissimulates itself from bone, a revealing index of sexualized cadavers, an army of clit cops, the bearded vagina dentata manbear, used puppy hammers, an unceasing cancer of palimpsestuous forms of maybe the same figure over and over, face replaced, are only parts of the beginning. This is The 40 Seasons.

 

A decade in the life of Duchamp's Étant donnés, 40 Seasons privies a viewer unto a keyhole intercourse, a peeping tom occupying a synapse of dreamlike depravity, a viewer who gives way to an orgiastic cornucopia of scientific scavenging and supine succubi; the hirsute's rotten nose a liberated third eye. Images are dripped to form bulbous droplets of ink oozed from some baroque bioport. From the man's shiny erection bursts forth a flower suddenly pollinated by a frenzy of insects.

 

Pathos hit with raking light recalls Goya's late work where emergent characters poured from the prism of the Spaniard's near blind eyes to be scrawled onto scraps of ivory and now here again with Kleckner onto thumbnails of paper, updated and yet ageless, actors from the absolute corner of one's psyche. Victorian miniature portraits of bodies in search of anodyne pleasures, the black-eyed sorrow of some simulacric superhero bruised inside a grotto-esque dimension, 40 Seasons employs a draftsman's scalpel of detailed incision upon every fold, crease, tear or slough of flesh as a means to illustrate an inner journey."

– Aaron Moulton, excerpt from forthcoming catalog John Kleckner: The 40 Seasons.

 

Kleckner's work is included the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY (The Judith Rothschild Collection of Contemporary Drawings), The Saatchi Gallery, London, Magasin 3, Stockholm, Sweden and The Deste Foundation Athens, Greece. Forthcoming exhibitions include "The Power of Paper", The Saatchi Gallery, London, and "Rock Opera," CAPC, Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux, France.