Stefan Kurten's painting Long Time Now, 2002, I suddenly thought of an old children's-book illustration for a long-unremembered nursery rhyme: "Little Jack Homer sat in a corner, / Eating his Christmas pie"--that one. The artist had imagined a small boy sitting scrunched on the floor in a corner, gazing wonderingly at a pie he held on his lap. Though the child was brightly lit, the room's walls, towering above him, rose up in shadowy darkness--and they were covered with the wildest wallpaper, a universe of magical symbols and signs. Even now I love that picture: Surrounded by intimations of the enormous world, wide, various, and not completely safe, the boy is yet intent on immediate pleasures and nourishments, if a little awed by them as well.Stefan Kurten's scenes of an idyllic suburbia unleash the awesome wonder in the nature of small things. Overwhelming in their obsessive detail, Kurten's gardens and interiors become macrocosms of discovery, where pastoral homeliness unfolds as sublime infinity of repetitive shapes, patterns and textures. Balancing the order of a utopian construction with the organic chaos of nature, Kurten's paintings reflect a spiritual harmony, thus creating a poetic beauty in their suggestion of cyclical transience.
Kurten draws from art history to utilise the ideological strategies of classic image construction; gold paint makes reference to religious icons and alchemic wisdom. His compositions are often based on the mathematical precision of the Golden Mean. The finite qualities of science provide a working model for visual tranquillity and spiritual enlightenment.Kurten's canvases create self-sustaining environments determined by their own mystical reason. Through painting, Kurten's dazzling compulsion becomes a meditative repose, offering beauty as a form of escapism, and the wishful gratification of daydreams.Kurten explores the virtuality of paint. His mosaic-style brushwork seems not just to replicate colour, but the prism-like workings of light itself. Shadows and highlights are refracted through tiny strokes and dabs, made more vibrant through the illusion of contrasting hues, where fields of metallic paint carry their own luxurious reflections. Scenes set up in careful accordance to perspective are remote and contrived.Stephan Kürten’s paintings adopt a Renaissance era concept of beauty as mathematical precision. The finite qualities of science provide a working model for visual harmony and spiritual enlightenment. In Silence, Kürten bases his composition on the classical proportion of the Golden Mean. Disclosing this rectangular purity in the grid-like perspective of the building, Kürten repeats this Utopian ratio throughout; the organic disposition of the foliage yields to the refined rules of culture. In painting the precarious balance between nature and civilisation, Kürten finds affinity in its perfection of order.