In 1st Steps, shafts of yellow light cut through a dark fresco surface, finding partial forms, shadows, and a bowl-like object hovering near the lower center, only partially resolved against the surrounding grey and black. The light is not ambient; it arrives from specific angles, stage-directed, creating the impression of a discovery in progress. Kitterle’s fresco surface contributes texture that the light cannot fully explain: scratches, blotches, and absorption variations that precede any compositional intention and remain incompletely accounted for.
In 1st Steps, shafts of yellow light cut through a dark fresco surface, finding partial forms, shadows, and a bowl-like object hovering near the lower center, only partially resolved against the surrounding grey and black. The light is not ambient; it arrives from specific angles, stage-directed, creating the impression of a discovery in progress. Kitterle’s fresco surface contributes texture that the light cannot fully explain: scratches, blotches, and absorption variations that precede any compositional intention and remain incompletely accounted for.
Kitterle writes of “wandering in a labyrinth” of surface, in conversation with the “specters” that the material throws up: forms that are “clear, offering easy images to share,” and others “sunken, only whispering their possibilities.” 1st Steps stages this process rather than simply illustrating it: the yellow light is the artist’s provisional attempt at legibility, the darkness is everything that the surface has not yet yielded, and the viewer occupies the same position of incomplete understanding. The title is precise: this is the initiation, not the arrival.
The alchemical register is specifically active here: the hovering vessel, the yellow light suggesting illumination both literal and symbolic, the space that reads as laboratory or crucible. Yves Tanguy’s Surrealist compositions present a structurally similar encounter: partially resolved forms emerging from luminous fields, the viewer perpetually on the threshold of recognition without reaching it. Hans Hofmann, whose method shaped Kitterle’s formation, theorized light and dark as spatial forces in perpetual push-pull tension: the yellow shafts in 1st Steps advance against the dark ground in exactly this dynamic, and the composition holds its balance in that irresolution.
