About – Kiki Klimt

I never look at things but behind them - into the void. Never look at the clouds but the blue sky behind. One sees the sky only when there are no clouds. A true artist always sees it, whether the clouds are there or not. Never look at an image, never watch the vibration which it creates but the emptiness behind them. Blacklight, emptiness, silence.

Byography

Kiki Klimt is a curious person, looking for answers in everything she does and to all possible questions. What happens when she puts this colour over that? What if she rubs it in a little more? How do the format and internal relationship of energies of visual forms affect the experience of the image? What is the geometry of the flowers? Did old Pythagoras know? What is hidden in ancient myths, legends and books? What is light? What do historical records and modern scientific findings say about light and colours? How can she communicate what she wants even more clearly? How should she use this all-encompassing world of visual language?

There are many questions, so she has always created many seemingly unrelated projects: books, paintings, illustrations, interiors, design, and graphic novels. At the same time, she was constantly researching visual language, mythology, ancient spiritual writings, modern physics and chemistry, cosmology, mathematics, history and philosophy. Within the apparent chaos, a unified story slowly emerged, which began to come together in recent years and show its true face.

Currently, she is experimenting with visual language and writing a book about it. She is creating three main projects;

The graphic poems serial Arkanum (first book published in Dec.2023),
The painting technique based on DaVinci’s sfumato, “Painting with light“, where she is painting in the opposite direction to most painters. Instead of applying lighter or darker shades generated by an external light source, she uses colours in their internal irradiation, their inner light. She removes the material and replaces it with the light within the atom.
The research of visual language uses numbers, geometry, colours, and all the other elements connected to plants and ancient philosophy.

Above all, she is trying to understand what life is, what Art is, and what this is all about. It is not enough to believe what you see. You have to understand what you see.

It doesn't matter what's in the picture. It doesn't matter what is there as an image, realistic or abstract. The message behind is essential - hidden in colours, light, strokes and composition, between rhythm and melody.

working proces

THE COMPLEX SYSTEM OF CREATING

I combine philosophy, old knowledge about the human psyche and perception of the world, modern science, symbols, myths and legends.

1 Theoretical research: I am investigating the story I want to tell, looking for fragments in literature and academic texts, but above all, through practical research into the principles of painting construction. With a combination of theory and praxis — like peeling an artichoke — I am closer and closer to what I want.

2. The wood: The bases of the paintings are usually wood. The type of wood is in itself a connection to the story. Each tree has a different symbolic value; they are tactilely different and consequently affect how I paint and how colours react to various substrates. Therefore, it also depends on how the viewer perceives the picture.

3. Constructing geometry, numbers, and relationships between them. The geometric composition of each painting is tied to the ancient knowledge of Pythagoras—sacred geometry—where every geometric body and number has a qualitative value. It is based on the Quadrivilium, the foundation of the four fine arts of ancient Greece. It consists of four basic concepts: numbers (base of the language), geometry (field of syntax), colours (level and music), and stroke (vividness of paintings).

As Galileo Galilei (1623) said: “The grand book of the universe … was written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is impossible to understand a single word of it.”. For Greek philosophers, the proper use of geometry is for cosmological purposes, for investigating nature and bringing to light the wonderful range of patterns and types within the fabric of the Creator’s universe. The study of numbers has a similar object. The ancient Greeks and philosophers in the old tradition emphasised the importance of numbers, not for the commercial or secular advantage but because numerical studies, philosophically directed, lead the mind into a world of abstract order and towards a state of understanding that the Greeks called nous, meaning ‘divine intelligence’. Bertrand Russell, who began to see the profound value of the musical and geometric base to what we now call Pythagorean mathematics and number theory, also supported this view in The Analysis of Matter: ‘What we perceive as various qualities of matter,’ he said, ‘are differences in periodicity.’* All our sense organs function in response to the geometrical or proportional – not quantitative – differences inherent in the stimuli they receive. For example, when we smell a rose, we are not responding to its perfume’s chemical substances but instead to its molecular construction’s geometry. That is to say, any chemical substance that is bonded together in the same geometry as that of the rose will smell as sweet. Similarly, we do not hear simple quantitative differences in sound wave frequencies but rather the logarithmic, proportional differences between frequencies, logarithmic expansion being the basis of the geometry of spirals.

I construct geometrical compositions and numbers connected to painting with a knowledge of their symbolic meaning, form vibration, and the qualitative value of numbers. For instance, two is basically a duality, and that is what is born from it. I combine, distort, and try to find the best abstract geometric form to tell the story without the recognisable image.
I am sure it is possible to tell stories without recognisable images. For example, when we paint a rose, we are not responding to the image of the rose but instead to the geometry of the composition. That is to say, any image that is bonded together in the same geometry as that of the rose fills the same.
I am experimenting with visual elements and exploring visual language theory.

4. Choosing colour palettes: based on my understanding of different colour systems and the relationships between colours known in visual theory. It is essential to connect them to geometry and specific harmony. Colours are all connected; they are like tones of the melody in a song. It is like choosing the correct tonal scale

5. Image selection: The basis of the paintings are various photographs that I choose according to the expression I am looking for—the specific sequence of the story. It doesn’t matter who’s in the photo because we’re all women trying to find an identity in this chaotic world where self-respect has been lost through thousands of years of repression and lies. The photo is just a base to capture the wanted expression.

6. Painting, where I watch my created system unfold and add energy and correct strokes. All the pictures are painted using the technique of “Painting with light.” Each image has layers of paint from 70 to 300 glaze (example). I upgrade the strictly defined system during painting by observing and correcting—so images are as clearly and objectively expressed as possible.