Gegenüber den Bildern kommen die Objekte, die neben ihnen Stellung beziehen, einem radikalen Registerwechsel gleich. Tatsächlich sind sie jedoch aus diesen hervorgegangen. Als mittlerweile selbstständige Gestalten im Raum flankieren sie, keinem klassischen skulpturalen Verständnis folgend, eher fragil und in simpelster Nüchternheit die verhandelten Themen.
Die komplexe Frage, welche Gestalt Malerei angesichts künstlerischer wie ökonomischer Prägungen heute annehmen kann, wird in den ausgestellten Arbeiten Klaus-Martin Treders auf eine Option hin verhandelt, die, nicht ohne Exzentrik, vom Material her gedacht in einem gesellschaftlichen Resonanzraum aufgeht.
(Sonja Klee, 2022)
This type of presentation of the art of painting finds its context in sociocultural references that read paint as a kind of material and vehicle conveying meaning as well as links to objective worlds composed of things. Through synthetically produced drippings and layerings, which are readymade components made of paint and stored as an archive but put into action in the picture, the artist methodically deconstructs the myth of gestural authenticity. Instead, painting is reflected by means of an analytical impulse. Systematically, the thing-like, nakedly materialistic side of artistic matter is brought to the fore and this staging is further pursued by sprinkling in, or most recently, by placing onto and affixing to the surface of the poured paint, certain objects that were produced in an utterly independent process. These serve as intermediate stages on the way towards painting; they are naturalized painting materials, both object and purveyor of paint at the same time, whose factual and visual functions are tested sculpturally, all the while their referential and symbolic values are being negotiated. As importers of context, they make common cause with the physically engaged activity of painting thereby giving shape to a kind of anthropological abstraction.
Compared to the pictures, the objects that take up their position alongside them suggest a radical change of registers. In fact, though, they have descended from them. Having become by now autonomous figures in space, they flank, without observing any classical understanding of sculpture, rather fragilely and with the utmost sober simplicity, the issues at hand.
The complex question as to what sort of shape painting might presently assume in the face of artistic as well as economic pressures is answered in a singular way by Klaus-Martin Treder’s exhibited works: One option results from prior negotiations – an option that not without eccentricity proceeds by thinking outward, away from the material, and which has things dissolve in a space resonant with social meanings.
(Sonja Klee, 2022)