"Building A Possibilty Space Of Steven Krueger's Artwork"

We can break a discussion of Steven Krueger's artwork down into three areas of investigation: precedent, attractor space, and phenomenology. Precedent is concerned with touchstones we can look for in order to create some kind of boundary conditions for Krueger's artwork. We use the term "boundary conditions" in order to avoid setting up a line of influence, as if explaining the artists that Krueger enjoys or is inspired by gives actual insight into his own art. It's obviously not tangential, but that's why they must be seen as inhabiting an analogical network. Krueger is like this person or that person; his form is similar. To use analogy rather than causality (influence is a causal schema) is to respect the evolution of artistic forms.

In this sense, we can say Krueger is preceded by artists like Basquiat without ever having to forcibly link the two. For example, see Krueger's piece Bull. It is clearly in the same genus as Basquiat without ever being merely derivative, or in other words, it exists in the same aesthetic space, a space influenced by a peripatetic globalism. Krueger, first as a member of the US Navy and now currently working in the Foreign Service, very much has a style constructed by an intercontinental or an international movement. It's perhaps a style that can be forcibly manufactured in the US itself, but the flatness of character and the archetypal nature of the subjects is an aesthetic stand that comes to us from a historical point farther removed than the origin of our country.

This propels us into the second area of investigation - attractor space - which will tell us about Krueger's style without having to pen him into some stylistic cage. Again, the benefit of this is to understand Krueger's artworks without ever having to cripple them. For example to say Seated Woman or Nude with Hand on Hip are cubist paintings is to focus in on one particular aspect to the exclusion of others found in Krueger's style. An attractor, in dynamics talk, can be thought of like a magnet. In a certain space, a magnet radiates lines of attraction and repulsion, and in that space, we can locate relative amounts of how attracted or repulsed a given object is to that magnet. In Krueger's case, he is not a cubist though he has an affinity for cubism. He is not an abstract expressionist though he has an affinity for abstract expressionism. He is not a primitivist, though he has an affinity for primitivism. By not hemming Krueger in, we give him room to move about in this space without having to place him within a conceptual lockbox that amputates moments of his aesthetic as we jam the lid down.

This leads us finally into the phenomenology of Krueger's work or rather, what is the bodily feeling inspired by his aesthetic? Krueger himself has an interiority to his style; as he comments in a piece about his art in State Magazine, "My painting is strictly emotional." The question then for us the audience must be the translation of those emotions. To bring this up here is not to provide answers, but rather to give a structure for that questioning. How does the almost sanguinary aesthetic of Three People confront us? As an eerie disturbation? Are the empty eyes of his figures penetrating or merely blank? Are these archetypes a confrontation with our past or something for us to project our own feelings upon? These questions all map out the territory upon which Krueger treks.

-Andrew Beckerman