Otto Künzli: n

Artist list

Otto Künzli

Fukidashi

Fukidashi may be in the shape of a cloud, when they express excitement or happiness. Others, with sharp, pointed, star-like contours visualize fright, a push, a bang, a lot of tension. Fukidashi are those contoured, free spaces which serve as balloons for Japanese Manga characters, which use them to speak, wail and call. They are free spaces within drawn pictures, spaces filled with script and meaning. They are a complex system of signs, which – in addition to the written words - also communicate whether characters speak, think, talk on the phone, are angry or sad. Fukidashi are therefore abstract forms and drawn feelings; they are at the same time information and a free space for the information which is put into them.

This is a starting point for Otto Künzli’s series “Fukidashi“. Another one are the stars. Stars are in the sky. Looking at them means looking at a distant light. How can you draw that? Do you draw the light? Do you draw the body or – first and foremost – a body emitting light? Conventionally, a star is a pattern of ray-like, pointed strokes arranged around a centre. Otto Künzli wanted variations: he wanted to sketch his own stars, but what variations are possible? How does this alter the surface, the internal space, the content of the stars? And the word content is used here with a twofold meaning: as an area, originating from an extension in space and as a meaning, since a star is already a symbol both as a word and in common language. Like the Fukidashi, star shapes are symbolic forms too.
Hence the importance of the question: can stars be round? But what happens if the drawn stars are round, without jags and angles?
In Otto Künzli’s drawings, combined forms finally emerged from relatively simple star shapes. Some look like small beings. They resemble magic comic strip creatures, which transform themselves, changing as needed and depending on their position.
Here, though, we do not have this type of transformation, in which a form magically becomes a totally different one. It is rather a transformation in which existing parts arrangethemselves differently and by doing so acquire a new meaning and a new function.
You can look at a drawing and a potbellied being appears, walking as light as a bubble on pointed feet. If you turn the drawing, it may become a creature with horns on its head and tails, disappearing in the dark with rumbling steps. These are no concrete beings to which you can attach a specific identity. They are light, empty forms, provoking your imagination. Like Fukidashi and stars, the creatures that you see in them are also symbolic information.
In his sketches, Otto Künzli drew a dark hatching around a form, which remained a light paper surface. Fukidashi are also spaces standing out against the surrounding drawing.
They are spaces in a picture and at the same time outside it. Otto Künzli passed from the drawings to metal sheet. His metal sheet is rectangular like a picture format from which, in this specific case, a form is cut out. The outline of what has been cut out has sharp, polished edges. The form originating from it has a sharp, well-defined contour and yet it also appears changeable because, depending on where you place the metal picture, it changes based on the background, appearing through its outline.
On one side of the metal picture is a circular, clean hole through which runs a golden ring. The golden ring takes you away from the surface and from its pictorial nature. It transforms the picture into a communication surface, that you can wear on your body, a decorative projection surface. Otto Künzli’s pieces of jewellery are also signs, as are signs what they represent: stars and Fukidashi.


Heike Endter