Ken Kaminski’s paintings explode with texture and color. Reds and yellows slash across blue-black and purple grounds. Even the surface of the paint appears flayed. At first, these compelling works seem descended from the Abstract Expressionist tradition of painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Then another dimension emerges.
The thickly impastoed rectangles,
parallelograms and squares coalesce, and we realize with a shock that we’re looking
at the facades of two buildings we remember only too well.
For more than ten years Kaminski has been painting images of the World Trade Center and the terrible events of September 11, 2001. In these works, the Twin Towers often stand like mortally wounded figures, teetering on their foundations or crumpling under brutal body blows, spurting red, viscous substances. History tells us combusting fuel roared through the towers, but in these paintings it seems more like human blood.
Like the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who explored ancient symbols and pictographs in their paintings, Kaminski has found in the Twin Towers a resonant archetype. Modern and steely though these monoliths were, the artist imbues them with an almost Biblical power.
The poet and critic T.S. Eliot spoke of the “objective correlative,” an object or image that embodies an emotion so completely it transmits the feeling directly to the reader or viewer. In Kaminski’s hands, the Twin Towers are such things.
More than world-famous landmarks, feats of engineering that met a terrible end, they are images of human suffering. In the artist’s many reprisals of this subject, one feels the unassuaged grief of a mourner, returning nightly to a grave.
Long before 2001, Kaminski was exploring a symbolic realm where geography, politics and geometry intersect. During the Gulf War of 1991, the American bombing of Iraq compelled him to paint a series that included “Baghdad.” In this canvas, we seem to be looking down on a group of skyscrapers from the perspective of a bomber pilot. A red and white target marks the point of attack. Here the rectilinear shapes of urban Bagdad prefigure the Twin Towers the artist would paint a decade later.
Like most Americans, Kaminski watched the bombing of Baghdad on television. But his encounter with Ground Zero was different. Several weeks after the attack, the artist, who was living in New Jersey at the time, was invited by members of the cleanup crew to visit the site. A fine brown dust still hung over Lower Manhattan—a cloud that could be seen from miles away. What he saw that day informed his imagination for years to come.
Despite the force of his images, and the historic events they emerge from, Kaminski doesn’t see himself as a political artist. Instead, he says, his work is part of a personal healing process. This is especially true of his Twin Towers paintings—a subject he had no intention of devoting a decade to. But one painting led to another, and somehow they just kept coming, a shout of raw pain that found substance in paint.