In Flat Space, Gregory Kitterle arranges planes of teal and rose into a composition that feels both architectural and lyrical. Drips, combed textures, and floating linear traces hang like suspended notations, while ochre and white passages suggest fleeting figures dissolving into the surface—a visual language closer to palimpsest than picture. The painting resists traditional illusionism: instead of depth, Kitterle offers a stage where materiality and apparition meet, collapsing spatial certainty into poetic ambiguity.
The title itself plays with paradox, evoking flatness while hinting at layered meaning. Executed in fresco on canvas mounted on panel, the work’s matte, mineral surface resembles a fragment lifted from an ancient wall in Pompeii. Its textures thread the ambiguity between ancient and contemporary, ruin and renewal. Kitterle transforms the centuries-old medium of fresco into a modern meditation, where flatness is charged with memory. His language recalls Giorgio Morandi’s compressed still lifes, yet pushes further into uncertainty: architectural echoes collapse into gesture, leaving behind a palimpsest of time and imagination.
Resonances with Antoni Tàpies’ material poetics or Paul Klee’s symbolic marks can be felt, yet Flat Space remains singular in Kitterle’s vision. It is not simply an image but an environment where fragility and persistence coexist. The fresco surface anchors the work in history, while its abstract grammar unsettles expectations, making the painting a meditation on how memory clings to walls, and how perception continually shifts between the seen and the intuited.
