Jan Bresinski. New directions in landscape painting

Matter and space
 

In 1993, Bresinski expanded his work beyond the well-trodden path of canvas painting and turned his attention to the third dimension, that of reliefs and object art. Of the painting forms, the informal, landscape-like areas remained, which were interconnected by lines, bridges and rows of grids, reduced in colour to grey-blue, ochre and green-brown tones. From then on, he used voluminous insulation and lightweight panels from wool board and mineral bonding agents, known as “Heraklith”, as a support, from which the artist cut out parts of the landscapes and opened up views through to the wall surface. He arranged cut-out parts, some of them from other pictures and still attached to their border elements, as counterparts in positive-negative combinations. In these reliefs, entitled “Wandsegmente” (“Wall Segments”) (Figs. 9–12), Bresinski increased his fascination for the material by priming the support with a grey-white spackling compound made of chalk, sand and bonding agent. He then structured, scratched and cross-hatched the paint base with a scraper and steel brush, and only then applied the acrylic pigments. On the cut edges of the panels, porous structures were created, which combined with the earthy colours to remind contemporary viewers of “geological strata”[1]. Here, too, the informal compositions looked like aerial photographs, a “landscape torn up by an open-cast mine, in which differently coloured layers of earth, depths and channels [have been] exposed”[2]. 

At the same time, Bresinski succeeded in “opening up the image” with these works. In the words of Andreas Steffens at an exhibition opening some years later, he did so by increasing the density of the material following the removal of compositional elements from the image: “The images are broken-through in order to obtain freedom of view.”[3] The artist, Steffens says, expands his compositions into the space by introducing the wall surface as a second image background. Thus, three-dimensional reliefs were created, which enabled the painting to cross over into the field of object art and sculpture. The opening up of painting into the third dimension – something of which painters have dreamt since time immemorial – dates back to the beginnings of non-representational art. After 1914, Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) and Hans Arp (1886–1966) succeeded in this with their abstract reliefs, as did Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) during the 1920s with his material collages. Finally, during the 1980s, the opinion became established that the end of canvas painting was “imminent”[4][5] – a narrative that was further fuelled by the ongoing success of the Minimal Art movement that began in the early 1960s. During the period around 1990, Minimal Art, which began as a constructivist movement, was expanded by work with non-precious and raw materials. From now on, space as a third dimension was defined by object settings made of sand, stone, wood, iron, lead, plaster and colour, in Land Art as well as in object and installation art. Examples of this development are the works of Thomas Virnich (*1957) or the far-extending, abstract sculptures of Magdalena Jetelová (*1946). With Bresinski, these tendencies can still be detected in his work with plaster-grounded wool board panels.

The artist also succeeded in creating a transitional state between painting, sculpture, object and installation art with “Säulengang” (“Colonnade”) (1966, Fig. 13), which consists of “Farblandschaften” hanging on the wall and free-standing painted stela positioned in front of them. Elements of Minimal Art can be seen in the cubist Plexiglas columns, which were blacked out with graphite up to a certain height and in which cut-out segments from the “Farblandschaften” were inserted. Art critics saw “roughened surfaces” with wounds in the coloured image elements,[6] “as though scorched, injured and destroyed and yet healed again”,[7] while the stela represent tendencies to “hide” and become visible again.[8] The encapsulated “landscape” segments were seen as being “acts of destruction and dissolution” and the artist’s thoughts on “disappearance and forgetting”, which he was attempting to counteract by preserving or restoring reality.[9] At that time, all these tendencies could be found in different currents of contemporary art and were by no means incorrectly applied to the interpretation of Bresinski’s works. In relation to his interest in sculpture, he himself stressed that he “still [perceived himself] as a painter”: “I make three-dimensional pictures”.[10] The fact that “Säulengang” had its entirely logical place in the series of previous and later works is attested to by the Roman numbering, which begins with “III” with the “Farblandschaften” (Fig. 1), reaches “IX” with “Säulengang”, and which would continue with further groups of works through to “XVII” in 2004 (Fig. 34). 

With the groups of works entitled “Inwaendig” (“Turning In”) (Figs. 14, 15) and “Wandfenster” (“Wall Windows”) (Figs. 16–18), the artist continued to move between painting, relief, sculpture and installation as art forms. He transferred the painted, landscape-like segments inside (Fig. 15), before inverting them in cut-out form outside (Figs. 14, 16). In Steffens’ words: “an individual art of the painting object” was created.[11] “The image remains visible, but it recedes into the hidden safety of an interior space, which is however not fully closed. The visibility remains, yet it is reduced in that the image now extends over four wood surfaces, which, with the image side turned inwards, are interconnected to form a box.” At this point in time, it was no longer the landscape that was the focus of Bresinski’s interest, but the further exploration of the spatiality of the image: “The alternating motion has become of key importance, which can occur between the poles of concealment of the image and the bringing of it to the fore.”[12] According to Steffens, in a speech at the opening of the “Inwaendig” exhibition in the “Krefeld Artists’ Society” (Gemeinschaft Krefelder Künstler) in February 1997, “there is a turning in painting, in the image, into the interior, into what was formerly a pure picture support, which now functions as a provider of space”, and it is a formal act of a painter “in the search for painting who distances himself from it, in order to be able to rediscover it”.[13] 

For Bresinski, the “Wandfenster” (“Wall Windows”) (Figs. 17, 18), for which he used Styrodur, a rigid foam board with an even surface structure, and acrylic glass as an image and object support, embodied a “longing for levity” as a counterpart to the melancholy of the colour-saturated structures.[14] Due to the transparency of the Plexiglas, the image was opened further, causing a reduction in the “pure presence of the image”.[15] The hanging of panels in series, one next to the other (Fig. 17), constituted a step away from the flat surface and towards the environment, in other words, towards a walk-through, spatial installation. Jürgen Röhrig described Bresinski’s “Wassermosaik” (“Water Mosaic”) from 1999, which the artist anchored in the Sieg river as part of the “Im Fluss” (“In the River”) art initiative that he himself curated, as the provisional end point in the development away from two-dimensional painting via three-dimensional image sculptures to a movable image object.[16] Constructed from aluminium-coated rigid foam on a plastic net of 3x10 metres, it showed a mesh of paths in a landscape over which the river flowed to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the water level. As a result, as was common in Land Art, it became an artistic component of the environment that had already been cultivated by humans.