Frank Kortan

An artist of transcendental intimacy

Prof. Dr. Miroslav Klivar, A member of The American Society for Aesthetics

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When perceiving the artistic creation of Frank Kortan, we are down if we want to apply the methods and clichés of classical art history.

 

We have to turn to the newest spiritual and theoretical conceptions from various fields of anthropology. We are led to it by honest intentions to get into the aesthetics of Frank Kortan.

 

The inspirations for the artistic creation of this painter are near to the surrealistic aesthetics of free imaginations and associations, the experience of the subconscious and nonconscious defined by Freud. But not everything created by Kortan can be explained in this way. According to him, antitheses cease to be "real or imaginative"; he is a follower of the relativity of existence.

 

When contemplating Kortan's artistic creation, we remember the words of André Breton from the Second Manifesto of Surrealism. He says that a surrealistic activity aims to define "a certain spiritual point from which life and death, authentic and imaginative, past and present, notifiable and on notifiable, high and low cease to be perceived as antitheses.

 

" Kortan's everyday motives express his love of dreaming which has been named "Via Regia" - nonconsciousness. Nevertheless, we cannot confine the perception of Kortan to classical psychoanalysis.

 

It seems that the most truthful are concepts that Gaston Bachelard applied in his Phenomenology of Dreaming, where he distinguished the values of dreams. In this respect, Kortan is a master of absolute dreams and half-dream.

 

In his paintings full of "old" and "new" eternity, we register something, which is named "dreaming about dreaming." Kortan's absolute dream of night sleep is, in fact, a Universe. We acquaint with Kortan's animism: nothing is death in his still lives - everything is live.

 

 

The activity of subconsciousness is evident: one motive is replaced by another; psychical accents are transferred to other ones. Aesthetic condensation, defined by psychoanalysis, is substantial: two - or more - imaginations combine and create more complex images with more profound meaning and stronger energy.

 

We register out-of-sensuous perception, especially the transfer of aesthetic meanings. As a matter of fact, Kortan is one of the world's avant-gardists because his paintings are near to "individual mythology," which is focused on the retrospective classification of the past and inspired by the "tracks of human civilization" and emphasizes "the re-vitalization of fragments."

 

While Anne and Patrick Poirier look for archeological inspirations, Nikolaus Lang depicts the atmosphere of a Bavarian family, and Jürgen Brodwolf paints miniature shop windows; Frank Kortan confines himself neither to a metaphor nor a concrete event. We have to point out Kortan's aesthetics, which reflect the out-of-sensuous psychology of C.A.Mace, who presupposes the existence of a "psychical ether" through which the waves of thought spread and in which the tracks of events remain.

 

In addition, the aspect of temptation is presumed. If he did not admire the symbolic-sexual aspects of a woman nude, he would not be a surrealist. Nevertheless, these aspects oscillate between latent, evident, and mysterious in his artistic creation. These are the symbols of women. As unconsciousness follows the principles of delight and not reality - as we learn from psychoanalysis - Kortan expresses the eternity of delight. He reminds the words of Nietzsche on his tablet in Sils-Maria See in Upper Engadin: "Every delight is eternity."

 

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Kortan invites introspection and purification from the sentimentality of civilization. He wants a man to be immune against any tie resulting from work and the world of things. In this respect, he is "transcendental." In this respect, we can cite an idea from Indian spiritual culture: "A work which does not cause any tie is a work with the transcendental result, i.e., karma-yoga."

 

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Kortan does not aim at the Absolute Personality of the Deity: he represents a happy soul and wants everybody to be like him ...