Avalanche, 2023

Charcoal on canvas, 200 × 200 cm
© K37 Studio, Berlin

Text by noT

Avalanche is a charcoal drawing about scale, belief, pressure, and collapse.

At the center of the work is a mountain range, large, silent, and almost monumental. The peaks rise sharply, built through layers of charcoal, light, and deep black contrast. The image first appears as a landscape, but it does not remain only a landscape. It becomes a place where physical height and symbolic weight meet.

At the summit of the central peak, the word “GOD” appears. It is small, almost quiet, but impossible to ignore. It does not explain the image. It opens it. The word sits at the highest point of the drawing like a sign, a doubt, or a question placed at the edge of the visible world.

On both sides of the composition, the words “LEFT” and “RIGHT” appear in red. “LEFT” is crossed out. “RIGHT” is marked with a white cross. They function like directions, but also like decisions. They suggest movement, opposition, belief, ideology, and the strange violence of choosing one path over another.

Nothing in the drawing resolves that tension. The viewer is left between the mountain, the word at the top, and the two opposing signs. The work does not say where to go. It creates the pressure of having to choose.

To the right, a dark cloud begins to enter the image. It feels heavier than weather. It pushes against the mountains as a black mass, soft and unstable, but also threatening. The cloud interrupts the solidity of the landscape. It suggests that even what seems fixed can be overtaken, erased, or pulled into movement.

Charcoal is central to that instability. The material allows the image to exist between construction and disappearance. The mountains are dense, but not permanent. The black areas carry weight, while the grey passages remain fragile and open. Everything feels as if it could shift, fall, or be swallowed by the next layer of darkness.

The title, Avalanche, points to a force that has not fully arrived yet. The drawing holds the moment before release: before the mountain breaks, before the cloud takes over, before the decision becomes irreversible. It is a suspended image, full of pressure.

This is not a landscape of peace. It is a landscape of uncertainty. Faith appears, but not as comfort. Direction appears, but not as certainty. Nature appears, but not as shelter.

Avalanche does not offer an answer. It holds the viewer in the space between belief and doubt, left and right, ascent and collapse. It is about the moment when something larger than us begins to move — and we are still standing there, trying to understand what it means.

nOT