Jan Bresinski. New directions in landscape painting

The landscape as a structural space
 

After the millennium, Bresinski moved away from abstract art and returned to real-life landscapes, although without representing them in the Realist, Naturalist or Plein Air style by faithfully recreating their external appearance. Rather, he was interested in structures that define the landscape space as a conglomerate of natural forms and traces of human settlement, in other words, as a cultivated landscape. In 2001, the urban landscape of Kraków, where he studied, inspired the artist to create a 16-part tableau (Figs. 21, 22), on which a fine mesh of lines, carved in wood and printed, shows the city from a bird’s eye perspective as a tangle of more or less real-life building outlines, roof shapes, borders around parcels of land, residential areas and roads. The view over the old city towards the south onto the district of Kazimierz and the Vistula river appear discernible; however, the topography cannot be verified in detail. In the foreground, the city stands as a settlement area, the simultaneity of its ground plans and elevations reminiscent of both the city views painted by Braun and Hogenberg in around 1600 and the aerial photographs taken from 1860 onwards, first from hot-air balloons, then later from Zeppelins and aeroplanes, and which are now possible from space satellites, meanwhile simulatable by anyone with access to Google Earth on the internet. Just like in Bresinski’s work, all these historical and current images usually contain no people, and expose the settlement structures shown to observers or attackers of whatever kind without offering any protection. With its high degree of abstraction, the eight-part tableau “Fluss” (“River”) (Fig. 23), which was presumably also inspired by the same section of the Vistula river near Kraków, demonstrates that Bresinski was not only interested in topographical reality, but also in typological structures in relation to the human settlement of the landscape. Settlement boundaries and the connecting and overland routes are abstracted to a mesh of lines, with the river itself to an absence that extends through all the segments. Only the observer will identify the abstract overall impression of the work by referencing their experience with similar structures from aerial photographs or landscape maps. 

The connecting element to the works of the following years was the three-metre-long triptych, “Continuum” (2001), the first panel of which consisted of a landscape photograph with a field, forest and hills from Bresinski’s local area in the Rhine-Sieg river region. The two other panels – which are separated from each other by meandering, river-like gaps – show abstractions taken from photographs consisting of reddish-ochre coloured areas, black paths and crossings that suggest a bird’s eye perspective of the landscape.[17] This work once again verifies Bresinski’s own view of the landscape space, which focuses on the geological and sociological structures of the landscape that has been cultivated by humans, and which already emerged in his early “Farblandschaften”. However, it was also manifest in the change in the artist’s personal circumstances, when he moved from an urban environment in Kraków, and later Neuss, Mönchengladbach and Krefeld, to a rural area in the Rhine-Sieg region. As Steffens remarked at the opening of an exhibition in the Gemeinschaft Krefelder Künstler, the landscape is no longer the “subject” of his artistic work, “to a far larger extent, it is expressed, as it were in this artist, who sets down what occurs within him in response to its impact”.[18] “There is nothing more continuous than the experience of landscape”, he wrote in the exhibition catalogue, “since it has no beginning and no end. In order to attest to it in imagery, therefore, there could only just be one single picture, one that does not begin and does not end. “Continuum” by Jan Bresinski are cutouts from this one image, which should in fact exist, but which is impossible.”[19] We could expect to see the beginning of an “endless series” of landscape images,[20] of abstract “approximations, therefore, which cannot end, because their subject is endless.”[21]

Bresinski created such a series of works related to the landscape with its essentially endless possibilities between 2002 and 2004, with the series “Land/Über/Gang” (“Land/Over/Path”) (Figs. 24–34). The first results, and the inspiration taken from earlier works, could be seen in 2002 in the exhibition of the same name in the Alte Rotation hall of the Rhineland Regional Museum (Rheinisches Landesmuseum) in Bonn, in which the work “Fluss” (Fig. 23) was also shown as a floor installation.[22] The essentially multi-part works in the “Land/Über/Gang” series consist of contrasting panels set opposite each other: “Farblandschaften” on the one side, as derived by the artist from the photographed cultivated landscape in “Continuum”, and mesh-like settlement structures against a graphite-coloured background on the opposite side, which are interconnected by river-like empty spaces (Figs. 24–27, 29, 30). Town and country, the structures of cultivated and urban landscapes, stand in contrast to each other as typical living spaces created by people, each with their own aesthetic. The contrasts in terms of the materials, colours and structures communicate different tensions and moods for the type of landscape in question. An article on Bresinski’s exhibition in Bonn stated that: “For his artistic nature,” the departure from the city was, in Bresinski’s words, “a life with forms and lines”.[23] 

Deviations from the pattern in which settlement structures reshape the course of the river and are superimposed over the landscape (Fig. 28), or narrowly intertwine with each other or crowd each other out (Fig. 31), expand the possibilities of interpretation. In the works created in 2004 (Figs. 32–34), both areas face each other in their individual manifestations as diptyches, either corresponding to each other or in competition. At the same time, the overall impact remains abstract: “The view from above onto the landscape, which is familiar to us from aerial photographs or satellite images, may be an inspiration for the artist,” Katharina Chrubasik writes in the exhibition catalogue, “but the subjects of his paintings are primarily abstract images, in which contrasts and tensions are produced with colours and structures.”[24] The artist frequently works dialectically and with pairs of opposites. The title, “Land/Über/Gang” describes transitional elements in the landscape, such as those that are visible between a cultivated and an urban landscape; on the other hand, paths crossing the land, in other words, wanderings by the artist through the landscape, could also be meant. According to Steffens, during these wanderings, Bresinski blasts “moments, situations, places from out of the ‘Continuum’ of his own perceptions, in order to treat them as case studies, as it were, of an aesthetic deep Earth geology.”[25]