Köhler’s drawings appear before us with a great delicacy as if they would not touch us. Sharpened like a silverpoint with an apparent inquiring line, the layers one over the other encapsulate a transparency reaching the core.
These drawings seem to be presented as a finished product, yet remain in a continual
process.
But what is going on? Clandestine catastrophes in every case, but do we see them before or after they have happened? We do not know. Köhler is capturing what is going on in a metaphysical way. There is no before and no after; time has no beginning and no end. Time exists as a vector of space, which cannot be measured, not even as a function o speed (of interaction? of perception?). It is a process, which continues but which we cannot fathom.
In one case a man observes this process. He looks deep down as if it happens outside of the drawing. Inside, there is an unsettled space consisting only of arcades and vials, a laboratory built from a house, in which someone examines his own cognition. The only thing one can be sure of is gravitational force, if not anatomy. However, this impression is deceptive as well.
Köhler’s inventions are hybrids through and through. They emanate from a fantasy of unfamiliar images, untouched by the influence of media, and will remain arcane if we avoid venturing outside of the margins, beneath the perceptual threshold of everyday life. They are saturated with the influence of the present yet remain outside of it, like dreams. Following the mode of the Old Masters, Köhler instills in his figures a sense of purity, even if they appear lascivious. According to Adorno, we cannot understand these masters or their time; we simply assume we do because we believe we know them, but this is seldom recognized.
Köhler’s method is only apparently syncretistic. The Italian and Dutch artists of the early Renaissance shaped his mental imagery: angels, madonnas, and martyrs. These images are his reality and sometimes also, in a direct sense, his language. Through them he projects the pitfalls and experiences of the present: sleep and love; pain and threat; escape from world and time; and always the longing for understanding, the impossibility of which he refuses to accept.
However, in actuality, Köhler’s works belong to the ars oblivionis. They deal with the forgotten and with the unstable state of our awareness. In this state we understand vision as a fleeting reverberation of a further knowledge, as deja-vu that slips into the process before it can be recognized as an apparition. One can see this as a consoling process because only that which was forgotten can be remembered.
This may be the cause of the metaphysical balance, which these drawings stir up. It reminds us of a memory reflecting something unclear, something forgotten. The draughtsman ensures that we can take possession of these memories again, if only we immerse ourselves in the sophisticated Camouflage of his pictorial constructions. 

Translated from a text by Matthias Flügge

Vice President
The Academy of Art, Berlin