Galerie Martin Kudlek

Ellen Keusen is an artist of quiet yet unwavering movement. Her line is not a tool of limitation but an open breath, “for whom the connection between two points is not essential, […] but rather the in-between, and with it the trace of time set in motion” (Stefan Kraus, Ausdehnung und Grenze – Zu Werken von Ellen Keusen). It is within this in-between, this almost imperceptible hovering, that her art unfolds – as a growing structure, as organic thought, as a patient search for a form that can never be fully grasped. Like an author who writes sentences to describe silence, Keusen draws lines to open up space. Her works emerge through processes that verge on meditation – “until creative tension fades” – in which time itself seems to stretch, as if it were her very material. The result is a series of “clouds” made of strokes, condensations of duration and devotion, leading the viewer into a silence that speaks more about space than any architecture could. Perhaps within her persistent effort to dissolve the boundaries between things lies a quiet hope that art might make the inseparable perceptible. For, as she herself says, she holds on “with stubbornness to the goal of blurring the transitions” (Kraus, ibid.) – as if to remind us that the world is not made of lines, but of everything that exists between them.