Jan Bresinski. New directions in landscape painting

From landscapes to flat surfaces – from flat surfaces to landscapes
 

During his early years as an artist, Bresinski painted in a representational, figural style. He was interested in the work of the Polish Kapists (“Kapiści”), a group of young art students formed in 1923 around their teacher Józef Pankiewicz (1866–1940) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and who called themselves the “Paris Committee” (“Komitet Paryski”, or “KPści”). The following year, the group travelled to Paris, and in the decades that followed, they introduced the colourism used by the French Impressionists to Polish art. In the work of Jan Cybis (1897–1972) in particular, this approach – the focus on colour while avoiding symbolic or political interpretation – remained influential right through until the 1970s. Piotr Potworoski (1898–1962), who was also a member of this group, made a particularly deep impression on Bresinski. Potworowski had fled to England via Sweden during the Second World War, and did not return to Poland until 1958. From the 1950s onwards, Potworowski’s analytical perspective on nature led him to create flat works in which he took real-life landscapes and extracted only the colours that occurred within them. He then created large colour fields that come close to abstract representations. With regard to figural painting, Bresinski became interested in the School of London in the 1970s, which centred around R.B. Kitaj (1932–2007) and Francis Bacon (1909–1992). 

Bresinski completed the break with traditional, objective forms of representation when he made the decision to fully embrace abstract art during the late 1980s. His “Farblandschaften” (“Colour Landscapes”) created from then on (Figs. 1–8) reflect the influence of the German and international Art Informel. From the mid-1950s onwards, Emil Schumacher (1912–1999) developed an abstract style of two-dimensional painting, drawing inspiration from the abstract, gestic tendencies from America and Paris. In his work, the strong colour contrasts in directly “geological” structures suggest eruptions and the breaking up of the Earth’s crust. These images were interpreted as being seascapes. They retained their emotional impact right through until the 1990s. The abstract compositions of the Spanish artist Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) also appeared to present geological formations or prehistoric settlement forms. Relief-like painting structures, which Tàpies created by mixing sand into the paint, underscored the impression of telluric landscapes. The use of sculptural materials such as paint mass, plastic, sand, gypsum or papier-mâché, prepared by Jean Fautrier (1898–1964), finally the introduction of inflicted damage, scratches, scarring and suturing into the painted surfaces by Alberto Burri (1915–1995), then the increasingly predominant sculptural techniques used by Bernard Schultze (1915–2005), led artists to appreciate material and nature in a new way.

Bresinski’s “Farblandschaften”, which he produced up until 1993, show a consolidation of this development. They are of an informal, i.e. abstract, non-geometric painting style, which extends over a purely flat area and which enters reality through the creation of shape. They unfold their aesthetic impact through the tension between line and flat space, the balance between the individual parts of the composition, and through the brilliance of the colours, their gradations and contrasts. At the same time, the painted panels, with their large share of acrylic pigments that stand out relief-like on the surface on medium-density fibreboard (MDF), which at that time was a new support material, emanate a particular fascination for the artistic material. Visible traces of scraping and brushwork, scratched-in cross-hatching with scrapers, dried acrylic paint that stands out from the surface, furrowed structures and three-dimensional ridges that pass through between the colour areas all increase the strong impact of the artistic media used. These plastic structures create an impression of landscapes as they might be seen from the perspective of an aeroplane flying ten thousand metres above the ground. Fields, lakes, deserts and snow-covered areas can be discerned, which are divided up by roads, canals, bridges and rows of trees; people are no longer visible due to the high altitude. 

Through his intensive work with the material, therefore, Bresinski transported his abstract compositions into the realm of nature as a physical reality, creating landscape paintings in which the viewer can at least assume that people are present and can locate their own place in the image on the basis of their own visual experience. Like numerous artists of the various abstract genres that emerged from the 1950s onwards, such as Hans Hartung (1904–1989), Karl Otto Götz (1914–2017) or Pierre Soulages (*1919), Bresinski has since produced series of works under the same title, assigning them with serial numbers according to the year. His avoidance of narrative titles underscores his departure from objective-figurative art; instead, his decision to work through abstract themes in variations and series is highlighted. At the same time, with the series title “Farblandschaften”, Bresinski also allows a connection to the real, physical world, and in so doing returns to the influence of Potworowski and his landscapes that have been abstracted from reality. In 2000, he produced another set of four “Farblandschaften” (Figs. 19–20), which, arranged as a block of four, appear as individual photographs of the surface of the Earth.