A type of painting expressed through absolute, ferocious, unheard of, I would like to say, colors, to try to connect the impact of such chromatisms to the startling that at the same time rises from the content that is evoked, so much as to remind one of the assumption of Dubuffet by which: «Art must scare and must bring happiness. Art is made of folly and delirium: no manierism, no habit, no cunning or cultural wisdom…»

In his studio of Via Guerrazzi the artist shows his work and while he is moving a large painting temporarily loose on a stretcher, the waving of the canvas contributes to confirm the sensation of how these paintings are really able to make the walls tremble. One guesses from the very beginning that one exchanges a few words, how inside the calm of the man, there is the agitation of an articulate and complexed personality, reflecting that some dichotomy that occurs between his quiet way of talking that curiously reminds me of the cadence of the Mississipi River boats, and that screaming, excited character of his painting.

Read more of critical biography by Marco Moretti

Ken's work cannot be summed up in a few words because it is a work that is extremely varied, it is a work that at its origin has had for long periods at a time, a very strong let's say, existentialist anxiety, which has taken him to extraordinary pictorial clamours….

Some one has spoken for him of magic expressionism and it is true because the artist, among other things, crowds his large canvasses - he paints always on large formats - with symblic and capricious props, made of flowers, animals, butterflies, birds, cats , an antroorphic bestiary, if one could say so, of a great artist that has an extreme representative power...

...and most of all he binds that only God can give, that is the talent of being a great artist...

We are therefore in front of a nightmare and of the attempt to free oneself from it through the impellent and screamed confession, leaving no time to an overthought.

The incubus of the alientating modern world - above all American - that our friend Ken lives and carries along - in corpore suo - with his flights and returns and new fleeing from New York, Chicago, St. Louis, his home town, to this illusion of peace and of human reconquest in Italy, in Florence…

In Ken Tielkemeier's coherent work is always evident the will, never scraped by current modes. Of a coherent sound operated as much as in the physical sense of forms, expressed in the vibrations of materia and blood, as in the rummaging in the recesses of the soul, to give back sublimated by art, the "malaise" contracted during the long twisting "task of living".

Memory goes back to Via San Leonardo, to the long afternoons at "Fontana", to the young painters, proud and emotional, who sat with their extraordinary Maestro Ottone Rosai. Among these, not so many who would have later made a career - Caponi, Loffredo, Faraoni, Tirinnanzi - still today remember an American student, Ken Tielkemeier, who arrived in Italy with a scholarship sometimes in 1956 and who by the shores of the Arno together with love, discovered and recognized the origins of great painting.

It was that blond young man from Missouri, so tall and slender , a dear presence among that aristocratic group, where like a precious gem showed up the person that would later become his inseparable life companion, Franca Barbara Frittelli, she too then a student of Rosai.

Tielkemeier rapidly met with everyone's esteem. Already from the first works submitted to the judgment of the restricted "cenacolo", it was clear how he made his own the lesson of some artists of the early 1900, among all Carrà, Sironi and naturally Rosai of whom some vibrant suggestions, especially in the Nude series, you may find in the "Selfportrait with lion's head", painted by the American artist in 1956, year of his entrance to the Academy of San Marco square.

Fantastic, unforgettable years, those…

Later , the long American parenthesis,work and success over the ocean, and finally the return, so longed for, to Italy, to Florence, among the friends who did not forget him or Franca Barbara. A long itinerary, as long as that that had charcterized the evolution of his work in over 40 years of relentless commitment: from Rosai's lesson to the disquiet and disquieting intonation of some recent work (Otho with visera, Selfportrati with zebra).

A talented painter, Tielkemeier , very appreciated today, but not yet fully as he should actually be.

With Tielkemeier the Florentine artistic landscape revives in the path of a real testimony of our time, from the post-war period of today, in the cultural tide of atmospheres: from the timeless space of De Chirico, to the figurative stylizations of Penck, to the marked sinuosities of Szezesny's trait, as far as the landscaped dimensions of Bounnels. But it is the incredible compositive weave of Ken's art - who has passionately dedicated his life to study and work, in continuous reflection with Franca Frittelli - to bring us into the expressionist world where the mystery hides in the magic of play.

For Ken Tielkemeier, after having studied art in Japan, in Mexico, in Chicago and in New York, landing in Italy was what caught him in the depths of his soul.

Meeting Maestro Ottone Rosai in the winter of 1956-57 marks for Tielkemeier's career a precise time, a solid step, may be the first real and trustworthy. His constant visits to the Uffizi, to other museums, to the churches of Florence, developed his reassurance, the equilibrium of his own expression, even though quite some torments and bewilderement, but that all took part of the growth of his development. His continuous exasperating work, his most complete dedication to art, his never letting go of a research for a true and genuine inspiration in todays most confused art world, guided this artist to a highly dignified expression.

Rosai said of him: "this young man is on the true road to painting"