KX — Bodies in Metamorphosis

There is something disturbing about KX’s sculptures.

His bodies rarely seem to rest entirely within themselves. They stretch, split, open, float; they produce other forms. Something comes out of them: a head, a tongue, a line, vegetation, sometimes another body—or something whose nature remains uncertain, suspended between several possible readings.

I keep returning to Metamorphosis, a work from 2021 that I encountered on OBJKT and collected. Compared with other works, there is something almost contained about this sculpture. The figure seems caught in the process of becoming something else, yet I cannot quite decide whether I am looking at transformation or escape, as though what inhabits the body no longer coincided with the limits assigned to it and were trying to get outside of its own form.

Perhaps there is no need to decide.

Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed. The violence of Kafka’s opening does not only lie in the transformation itself, but in its already accomplished character. The impossible has happened overnight, without transition or explanation, and consciousness wakes inside a body it no longer recognizes as its own. In KX’s work, I have the strange impression of encountering the transformation from another temporal position: not before and not after, but somewhere within it.

The more I look across his work, the more metamorphosis seems less like the subject of one particular sculpture than a condition his bodies repeatedly inhabit.

The Body Never Quite Settles

There are scars, although the scars don’t bleed. Flesh coexists with exposed bones; bodies are opened without entirely becoming corpses. Something almost autopsy-like inhabits these sculptures. They occupy an uncertain state, as if several temporalities of the same body had become simultaneously visible: what it was, what happened to it, perhaps what it is becoming.

Reabsorption is particularly troubling in this regard. An enormous form emerges from a head. I first saw a tongue. I still see one. Yet inside it appears what could be a torso, and suddenly the tongue is no longer only a tongue. Another body seems to be forming there—or being swallowed, expelled, reabsorbed. The more I try to distinguish one form from the other, the more they seem to contaminate each other.

This indiscernibility interests me. At what point, during a metamorphosis, can we say that one form has ceased to be itself?

Perhaps we cannot.

A transformation is usually understood through its beginning and its end. We recognize what something was and what it became, while the interval between the two tends to disappear. KX seems to dwell precisely within that interval, where the old form has not completely vanished and the new one cannot yet be named.

The insects appearing throughout his work make this interval strangely tangible.

There are butterflies, of course, carrying with them one of our most familiar images of metamorphosis. But there are also dragonflies. Before taking the aerial form through which we recognize it, the dragonfly spends much of its existence underwater as a nymph, repeatedly molting as it grows. During its final transformation, it climbs out of the water; the old exoskeleton splits and another body slowly extracts itself from it. For a moment, both are there: the living form and the material architecture that contained its previous existence.

Then one leaves the other behind.

Looking at KX’s scarred bodies after thinking about this process, the surface itself begins to acquire another temporality. A scar is already a strange thing: an event that has ended but remains inscribed upon the body. It belongs simultaneously to the past and to the present. The wound disappears; its form persists.

Perhaps this is why KX’s figures can seem to be changing even when they are perfectly still. Metamorphosis does not only occur through what emerges from them. It has already happened upon them, and the body remembers it materially.

Vegetation complicates this further.

Flowers and leaves appear on, beneath and around the figures, sometimes growing directly from them. In Blossom, vegetal forms erupt from the head. Elsewhere, the distinction between body and vegetation becomes less stable: one supports the other, surrounds it, penetrates its space.

Here, transformation does not operate through the violence of rupture alone. It proliferates.

A body can become other because something grows from it, because its form exceeds itself through what it produces. The transformation no longer requires the disappearance of the original body. On the contrary, it needs it as a ground from which another presence can emerge.

And little by little, what seemed to concern the transformation of the body begins to concern its limits.

Where Does the Body End?

We rely on skin to tell us where a body begins and where the body ends.

KX makes this certainty difficult to maintain.

The interior becomes exterior. Vegetation grows from flesh. Another figure emerges from a head. Bones cross the surface that should contain them. The body does not simply occupy space; it seems to leak into it, to continue beyond the place where its anatomical boundary should have stopped it.

Perhaps this is why the lines recurring throughout KX’s sculptures disturb me as much as the bodies themselves.

They are remarkably straight.

They emerge from bodies, enter them, cross them, connect forms separated in space. Against the instability of everything else, their rigidity is almost excessive. Flesh can open, vegetation can grow, bodies can mutate, yet these lines seem to know exactly where they are going.

My first reading was one of direction: paths extending outward from the self. But this reading became less convincing as the lines multiplied from one work to another. They do not behave consistently enough to become a simple metaphor. A line can extend a body and restrain it, connect two things while materializing the distance between them, pierce a form or establish an invisible continuity between separate points.

What interests me is perhaps less what these lines represent than the strange authority of their geometry.

The bodies hesitate. The lines do not.

Yet even this opposition becomes less stable when the works are experienced as GLB sculptures.

Looking at a still image, I can accept a line as part of the composition. In three dimensions, I cannot. I want to know where it comes from. I rotate the sculpture, follow the trajectory, lose it behind a body and find it again on the other side. I look for an origin, an endpoint. In Association, this movement eventually brings me back to the eyes.

At this moment, the line is no longer simply something I am looking at. It has begun to organize the way I look.

This shift seems important. The sculpture extends beyond its visible body without physically becoming larger. A line enters the apparently empty space surrounding the figure, and through the act of following it, this space becomes active. My gaze travels along it; my position changes; another part of the sculpture becomes visible. The trajectory belonging to the work becomes, for a few seconds, mine.

The limit has moved again.

And it is while following these places where forms emerge, extend, penetrate or cross one another that another recurrence becomes difficult to ignore: red.

Red vegetation. Red heads emerging from the body in Fateful Meeting. Red forms extending from eyes. Elsewhere, red spreads over increasingly large portions of the figure until, in some more recent works, it seems almost capable of absorbing the body altogether.

Within KX’s predominantly pale, gray or greenish universe, red creates an immediate rupture. It attracts the gaze, establishes depth, separates one form from another. This could remain a purely aesthetic observation if red did not so often appear precisely where something is happening to the integrity of the body.

The contradiction makes the association less obvious rather than more. Red already carries violence, danger, vitality, desire; perhaps too many meanings to be reduced to one. I would rather leave these possibilities circulating than choose among them.

But there is another way of approaching color here. Instead of asking what red means, we might ask where it happens.

It happens at emergence.

It happens at growth, at extension, around forms that seem to cross from one state or one space into another. Not always, and not systematically enough for me to turn it into a code. But frequently enough for the eye to begin expecting it.

Red then becomes less a meaning than an event within the image: a point of intensity where the stability of the body is being negotiated.

What Remains

KX uses the expression “energy of transformation” in his description of Eternal Battle (2023). Its subtitle, The Symbiosis of Fury and Tranquility, contains a word that seems to echo strangely through the rest of his practice: symbiosis.

To transform does not necessarily mean to replace.

Fury and tranquility can inhabit the same form. Flesh does not disappear when bone becomes visible. The body does not cease to be a body when vegetation grows from it. Geometry crosses the organic without resolving it. A monumental figure can remain vulnerable, scarred, opened, penetrated by what surrounds it.

The sculptures seem populated by these simultaneous states, and perhaps this is what gives them their particular strangeness. Their bodies are recognizable enough for us to identify with them and unstable enough for this recognition to immediately become uncomfortable.

They are human, but the human form no longer seems sufficient to contain them.

And so I return to Metamorphosis.

What is relatively contained within that sculpture seems to have dispersed throughout KX’s practice. Metamorphosis no longer belongs only to a figure visibly becoming another figure. It passes through surfaces, scars, insects, vegetation, lines and color. Eventually, it reaches the space around the sculpture and the gaze of the person trying to apprehend it.

Perhaps this is also why these bodies do not offer transformation as a passage with a clearly identifiable departure and destination. Something persists from one state into the next. Sometimes as a scar, sometimes as an exposed interior, a shell, an ambiguous form whose previous identity has not entirely disappeared. What came before remains close enough to disturb what is emerging.

The body never quite settles into the form it has become.