" É uma característica dos dias de hoje que nenhum acto de pintura está em total consonância com os tempos se não oferecer uma resposta a questões relativas à ambição, justificação e significado da pintura.
De forma subtil e não imediatamente aparente, Herbert Brandl coloca tais questões na sua publicação ÜBERMORGEN [THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW] de 2021 - um álbum de fotografias que se apresenta como se fosse a tradução da sua conta Instagram pessoal para o meio analógico do livro. Juntos sem qualquer lógica reconhecível, há fotografias a cores do jardim de Brandl, do seu apartamento e do seu estúdio, mas também fotografias de uma paisagem dramática, por vezes tiradas através de uma janela de carro, e uma variedade de imagens da Internet - fotografias de flores, do seu gato, de tapetes ou de arranjos de objectos do dia-a-dia e assim por diante. No processo - tão acidentalmente como intencionalmente...- as suas próprias pinturas e esculturas entram em jogo. Mobilizadas pelo meio da fotografia e por um algoritmo especial, as obras de arte entram num contexto infinitamente diferenciado e ao mesmo tempo uniforme de instantâneos digitais, tais como a comunicação dominante nos meios de comunicação social. Coloca-se então a questão: que sentido faz acrescentar mais alguns quadros - pintados pessoalmente - às miríades sem limites de imagens que já foram produzidas e consumidas?
A exposição Brandl Music for trees and moutains aborda esta questão contrapondo as suas pinturas à presença omnipresente de imagens que são transmitidas digitalmente. Os grandes formatos "Bonsai" e "Moutains", pintados em acrílico e exibidos separadamente, não só pertencem a uma categoria diferente das fotografias reproduzidas (incluindo as fotografias precisamente destas pinturas) como também estabelecem uma discrepância irreconciliável entre si e as imagens e a pictórica das reproduções".
- Ulrich Loock
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HERBERT BRANDL
Indeterminacy
Ulrich Loock
15.04 – 26.05.2023
What kind of times are these, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it involves silence about so many atrocities!
Bertolt Brecht, “To those born after us”
It is a feature of the present day that no act of painting is fully in keeping with the times if it does not offer an answer to questions concerning the ambition, justification and meaning of painting. In a subtle and not immediately apparent way, Herbert Brandl poses such questions in his 2021 publication ÜBERMORGEN [THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW] – a photo album that presents itself as if it were the translation of his personal Instagram account into the analogue medium of the book. Jumbled together without any recognizable logic, there are colour photographs from Brandl’s garden, his apartment, and his artist’s studio, but also photographs of a dramatic skyscape, sometimes taken through a car-window, and a variety of images from the internet – pictures of flowers, of his cat, of carpets or of arrangements of everyday objects and so on. In the process – as incidentally as intentionally – his own paintings and sculptures come into play. Mobilized by the medium of photography and a special algorithm, the works of art enter into an infinitely differentiated and yet uniform context of digital snapshots, such as dominate communication in the social media. The question then arises: what sense does it make to add a few further – personally painted – pictures to the boundless myriads of images that have already been produced and consumed?
Brandl’s exhibition Music for Trees and Mountains touches on this issue by counterposing his paintings to the ubiquitous presence of images that are digitally transmitted. Large-format “Bonsai” and “Mountains”, painted in acrylic and exhibited separately from one another, not only belong to a different category than the reproduced photographs (including the photographs of precisely these paintings) but establish also an irreconcilable discrepancy between themselves and the imagery and pictoriality of the reproductions.
Brandl has been painting mountain pictures for more than twenty years. “Bonsai”, on the other hand, came into his repertoire only recently. Even more rigorously than the earlier mountain pictures, these more recent ones – such as those exhibited here – restrict themselves to the colour blue in various shades, from dark to vibrant, and to black and white. These colours or shades act as signifiers for sky, rock and snow, but cannot in detail be seen as congruous with any given object depicted. The more recent “Mountains” seem raw, less differentiated, more forbidding than the earlier. They do not refer to any specific prototype – for example, the representation of an eight-thousander from the Himalayas. No referential certainty is offered. Rather, Brandl employs a minimum of painterly indicators to evoke, in each case in different form, the mental idea of a mountain, in which the senses of unreachable height and unconquerable distance are to the fore. While the reality of the mountain itself is characterized by its inaccessibility, the mountain in the painting volatilizes into the image of a ghostly apparition. The apparition belongs to the field of the visible: the image of the mountain and the evocation of distance are matters of visuality corresponding to the existence of the high mountains of the Himalayas or of the Alps as a picture-postcard view.
Brandl once formulated his position as a painter by saying that after Reinhold Messner had climbed all fourteen eight-thousanders in the Himalayas he decided to paint all eight fourteen-thousanders. Brandl’s painting, however, is unique in that it brings together corporeality and touch with the appearance of distance and its tie to visuality: as regards his immediate painterly praxis as the “mountain-seer” the artist acts also as a “mountaineer”. Brandl’s mountains are painted in broad, rapidly applied, pastose brush-strokes in black and white (or only in white) on an agitated yet largely uniform blue ground, at times also using a palette knife – clearly this painting is produced through major physical effort in front of the canvas. Following the painterly action, however, the gesticular motion of the brush-strokes has been neutralized by Brandl’s laying a second canvas on top of the fresh painting and then removing it. Consequently, the brush-strokes applied across the entire surface are shot through and transgressed by a detailed, ornamentally varied – and from a distance barely perceptible or wholly imperceptible – relief of cross-lines, streaks and gradients. Once the second canvas has been removed, however, Brandl can again paint into the original canvas with direct brush-work. Thus the application of paint renders a corporeality that cannot be reduced to the particular, personal impulses of the painter but exists as a comprehensive and general reality.
In Brandl’s painterly construct, the mountain is constituted both of the transitory, vanishing phenomenon of distance and of the closeness of touch – image and painting, representation and processual autonomy, visuality and hapticity. It is essential to recognize here that Brandl’s works bring together complementary designations of one and the same object – designations that perception cannot deal with at one and the same time. It is a mark of the complexity of Brandl’s conjoining of the irreconcilable that in his bonsai pictures he reconstructs the relations of proximity and distance in a reverse manner to that of the mountain pictures. The motifs for the bonsai pictures are trees that he himself possesses and looks after: they are part of his domestic surroundings. In Chinese and Japanese culture, bonsai has for centuries stood for an equilibrium between human beings and Nature – the opposite of the unrelenting alienness of the mountains.
While the large-format mountain paintings reduce their motifs to something approaching human size, the bonsai pictures enlarge their subject far beyond its natural dimensions. They reproduce the tree or trees flat, like a silhouette, and deprive them of their delicateness. In this way the simplification of the reproduction is taken to a point at which the colours (a few shades of brown and green) and the orientation of the brush-strokes are admittedly linked to their natural object but similarities beyond the rudimentary similarity of a signet are suppressed in favour of great aesthetic sparseness. Brandl can begin a picture by at first covering the canvas completely in yellow paint. The parts of the tree representing its wood, however, he has transferred in the form of monotypes from another painting and thereafter the treetops are painted in rather undifferentiated, directly applied brush-strokes in varieties of green. Subsequently, Brandl has the surfaces outside the trees covered in monochrome black. Where the dark-coloured painting of the surface does not join up seamlessly with the tree, a gleamingly yellow contour is created that surrounds the tree like a halo, and jagged incisions in the black-painted area point to a wind-buffeted tree-top. The gesticular directness of painting is even further restricted in works where Brandl has imprinted the painting of a bonsai onto several black-painted canvases in turn so that the image is completely determined by an act of indirect paint administration. Refracted through simple transfer printing techniques and re-vivified by direct application of paint, the painting style essentially resembles the paint application in the mountain pictures, even if the bent form of the tree calls for a stronger adaptation of directions of movement than the simple triangular form of the mountain.
It is striking and a matter for special consideration that the accelerated, bodily, decidedly gestural painting in the bonsai pictures does not have the same function as in the mountain pictures: whilst in a painterly appearance of distance it supports proximity and touchability, in the oversized pictures of a familiarized Nature it contributes to a disconcerting strangeness. The extraordinary size of the picture formats plays a major part here in the failure of any synthetic perception of the opposed and conjoined modalities of the mountain or the tree. While distance does not exist without closeness, nor closeness without distance, and both closeness and distance define both the mountain and the tree, in a way similar to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle the perceptual determination of one side compels the perceptual indeterminacy of the other side. In the constitutive failure of unambiguous perception, however, lies the decisive success of painting: by achieving a conjoining of the irreconcilable it visualizes the mountain and the tree to our eyes in such a way that, in either case, the totality of mountain and tree is denied to us – Brandl’s objects cannot be determined as consistent units.
If it is the function of pictures in Instagram accounts, and correspondingly also of photos in Brandl’s photo album, to bring up close everything that can be photographed, however distant it may be, the paintings refer to the reality of the unreachable mountains and the reality of the domestic trees in order to contradict such appropriation and, in this contradiction, to justify the insistence on painterly praxis. Brandl’s pictures of the mountains and the trees determine a specificity of painting: that it is able – against all conventions of cognition – to manifest the correctness of contradictory descriptions and to resist not only digital photography’s transfer of things into proximity but also the unambiguousness of portrayal in general. In this sense, Brandl’s painting leaves all questions as to the justified referent to one side and answers the question as to its own legitimacy by itself staging a crisis of referentiality. In this way, painting underlines its incomparable potential for establishing the self-evidence of a constitutive indeterminacy of things that holds back from a fixing of identities: in painterly terms, the lofty mountains and the domesticized trees alike emerge as objects in a world existing for itself, sacrosanct, exempt from human command.
As a consequence of its harsh juxtapositioning of two work-types, the exhibition Music for Trees and Mountains can be read as a manifesto on the specificity of painting. On the other hand, however, Brandl has also called into question the opposite contrast with the photographic production of comprehensive proximity, for example in his exhibition MORGEN [TOMORROW] in the Kunsthaus Graz (2020/21). In that exhibition, graphic paintings of animals, mountains, comic-strip figures and other things were on display alongside bronze figures – left as metal or painted – of cats, hyenas and further, unnamed animalic creatures; beside these was the monumental bronze sculpture of a rock crystal; there were non-figurative, strongly coloured and gestural paintings and older, large-format mountain pictures freely placed around the room-space or hung; also included was a taxidermied chamois from the Natural History Museum as were diverse other objects from the art world and from other cultural fields, occasionally staged in narrative constellations. Thus the framework of the exhibition was used to dissolve the lines of separation between artworks of various kinds and between things of an artistic and non-artistic origin, and – by way of experiment – to make new affiliations plausible. If pictures of mountains and pictures of bonsai tug painting’s vertical relationship to a referent into indeterminacy, the exhibition MORGEN divests the things exhibited of their determinacy by means of lateral relationships.
The exhibition MORGEN is comparable to the ÜBERMORGEN photo-book inasmuch as the medial organisation encloses individual exhibits in a common frame and permits or invites an overarching meaning such as “comprehensive chromaticity”, “representational diversity” or “boundless potential for concretization” to emerge. In the constellations of his exhibition Brandl produces a proximity to the photo album, without, however, as the album does, translating the things indiscriminately into proximity. On the contrary, in the exhibition Brandl makes great efforts to allot a special place to exhibits of varying types: black-and-white paintings are shown against yellow-painted walls; bronze animals on palettes or transport crates; individual paintings hang freely in the room or stand on stilts, and so on. In their opposition to one another, the pictures in the exhibition Music for Trees and Mountains, however, have their especial meaning in that they make indeterminacy as indeterminacy manifest to the senses.
Translated by Richard Humphrey
Entrada actualizada el el 14 abr de 2023
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