Coastline 1981

In Abdul Mati Klarwein’s painting, Coastline, the paint is applied with a curious blend of precision and abandon. Look at the texture! It's so dense and worked over, you can almost feel the grit of the rocks and the cool spray of the ocean. The way Klarwein builds up the surface is fascinating. There's a kind of obsessive detail in the rendering of the landscape, almost like a hallucination. Your eye bounces around, trying to take it all in. Then you notice the stark white lines slicing through the composition, creating this weird, disorienting geometry. It's like he’s pulling apart the image, revealing the hidden structure beneath. Klarwein reminds me a little of Hilma af Klint, actually, in the way he blends the natural world with abstract, esoteric symbols. Both artists seem to be searching for something beyond the surface of things, using paint as a way to access other dimensions. It's that sense of reaching beyond the visible that makes this painting so compelling.