Painted Love Potions

Around midnight on a winter Sunday, I went to Fredrich Kunath’s compound. He was having a few people over to have a drink at the bar he had built inside his cavernous studio. I walked through the workspace, past all the pieces that would soon anchor his first show at PACE in N.Y. The images were so strongly coded within his specific nostalgia, my head was immediately infected with an exquisite wistfulness: an overwhelming longing for familiar places I had never been to. I followed the sounds of Lucio Battisti drifting through the building to a black painted door and opened it to see seven jovial faces in a dimly lit room. Freddy was behind the bar; he waved me in and said, “You have to go down the pole.” He indicated a brass pole coming in through a circle in the ceiling. I was nervous, I didn’t know anyone here but Freddy, and I didn’t want to test my fireman pole sliding abilities in front of strangers who looked euro-cool and art-world-important. He kindly insisted, so I walked back out, up some stairs, and slid down the pole, at which point I was face-to-face with Ariana Papademetropoulos (which for the record, was a perfect way to enter the bar). As I tried to orient myself within the surreal effects of that enchanted place, I introduced myself and I told her how much I like her work.