Raoul Korzuschek
Raoul Korzuschek (b. 1991, Hamburg, Germany) is a contemporary painter based in Sorrento, British Columbia, Canada. His practice explores the fragility and impermanence of human existence through layered, abstract-figurative compositions. Working primarily in oil on canvas, he employs overpainting, scratching, and textured surfaces to reveal and conceal traces of earlier layers, underscoring the fleeting nature of both image and memory.
Grounded in the theme of finitude, his works resist permanence. Human forms blur into abstraction, reduced to fragmented limbs and visceral masses that merge into indistinct collectives. These compositions evoke the sensation of something once present, now barely visible, echoing the transient nature of life itself.
Korzuschek describes his paintings as "anti-monuments," countering cultural obsessions with timelessness and legacy. Instead, they celebrate transience and erasure, with muted greys and faded skin tones symbolizing the amalgamation of all colors, all lives. By foregrounding imperfection, fragility, and decay, his work invites reflection on mortality not as an ending, but as the very condition that makes life meaningful.
Artist Statement
Korzuschek's paintings are meditations on finitude, embracing impermanence and rejecting permanence. Each work reflects the reality that every moment—like every image—exists only briefly before fading. Through overpainting, scratching, and layering, his canvases reveal visible histories where traces of what once was remain faintly present, evoking the sensation of memories dissolving into time.
His current body of work, Pentiment, takes its title from the term pentimento, which describes visible traces of earlier images beneath the surface of a painting. Traditionally regarded as revisions or corrections, these underlayers are seen as subordinate to the final image. Korzuschek reimagines this relationship, elevating the hidden and erased to equal significance. In his work, the revealed and the concealed coexist, challenging the notion of a single, definitive surface and echoing the layered temporality of human existence.
At the center of his practice lies the human form, though never as portraiture. Figures fragment into limbs and visceral masses that resist individuality, rendered in muted greys and faded tones. These anonymous bodies become proxies for the shared human condition, embodying both fragility and significance.
By framing each painting as an "anti-monument," Pentiment refuses permanence in favor of celebrating transience. The series ultimately reminds viewers that life—precisely because it is finite—carries its deepest meaning in the present.
www.korzuschek.com
