KAI ALTHOFF’S “DI COSTOLE”(OF RIBS), 2024
EXHIBITIONS BY KAI ALTHOFF are rare and strange things. They tend to comprise work in many different forms and media, with the artist paying great attention to the setting, installation, lighting, and furnishing of the show. The exhibition itself becomes a work of art: intense, deeply felt, and wildly atmospheric—the evocation of a time and place that is as familiar yet unfamiliar as a dream.
Grammarians have developed a concept of “irrealis moods”: the conditional, optative, subjunctive, and so on, which deal with unknowns and counterfactuals—and which, as André Aciman recently put it, are “best expressed as the might-be and the might-have-been.” Althoff’s exhibitions always seem in sympathy with such distinct rearrangements of actuality, time, and temper.
“Di costole” (Of Ribs) comprised fifteen paintings and four drawings in felt-tip pen or gouache on newsprint, all made in 2024. The exhibition was held in three elegant high-ceilinged adjoining rooms on the second floor of a sixteenth-century palazzo in the center of Genoa. The name of the space, nervi delle volpi—meaning, roughly, “the nerves of the fox”—was invented by Althoff. Until recently, these majestic rooms were used as offices, and for all their grandeur they retain a somewhat faded bureaucratic air. This was offset in Althoff’s exhibition by pieces of exquisite modern and antique furniture, some of which were selected and in some cases modified by the artist. Among these were two daybeds reupholstered in a murky yet refined shade of chocolate-mauve; a low sofa with dark brown cushions (with some stains left visible at the artist’s request); and an ornate cocktail cabinet, on which were two boxes of sweets from the celebrated Genoese confectionery Romanengo.
Do such meticulously chosen details lend an air of welcoming domesticity? Or provide the opportunity for the visitor to become what Oscar Wilde called a “critic as artist,” for whom contemplation in exquisite repose is itself a work of art? Certainly, they augment the viewer’s experience of the works on the walls. Within the irrealis mood, moreover, they trip the temporal switch from what is to what might be. The works and their installation, brought together so carefully, proposed the condition of nostalgia for an experience that perhaps never happened, but was no less real for that.
Spending time with the works on display, the viewer might have felt that the “rib” of the exhibition title was Adam’s in the biblical account of God’s creation of man and woman. Many of the paintings depict young people—boys and girls. Their situations seem at once commonplace and touched with mystery. The expressions on these youthful figures are intent and heartfelt: obedient, frightened, absorbed, wary, withdrawn, cruel, proud, sly, or shy. The situations that elicit those expressions seem to be moments of being and becoming. And like the psychology of such occasions, the paintings are complex and densely worked. In one or two there are sudden slabs or shapes of rich bright color. Elsewhere, inquisitive faces loom up from hazy backgrounds; a straight fringe frames a determined expression. A little girl buys a hunting rifle. Another leans over a turntable in a room looking out on a garden. A small boy kneels before two other boys and a fair-haired girl, his hands and feet bound. The biggest boy, who is wearing a heavy orange jacket, seems to be cutting the cords with a curved, cruel-looking knife. The three felt-tip-pen drawings maintain the ludic aspect of childhood: doodles that might be fantasy landscapes, dream-maps, or intuitively created hybrid imaginary figures—creatures of a wet afternoon. They cover only about half the sheet of paper. The remainder has a few stray lines, marks, and smudges.
The exhibition catalogue is prefaced by a poetic yet sharply descriptive text by Giulia Ruberti, which gives just one version of the stories that some of the works might depict, with their protagonists named by single initials. We read of K. (perhaps Kai himself, but perhaps not), a believer in “spirits” who “wants to go to Nervi delle Volpi to awaken the ghosts of the missing children. That night, secretly, he runs away.” No further interpretation of the works feels needed or meaningful. The paintings and drawings work their own profound magic, without assistance.
Michael Bracewell’s most recent book is a novel, Unfinished Business (White Rabbit, 2023).
