Jan Bresinski. New directions in landscape painting

Architecture as a space for identity
 

The architectural structures that Bresinski painted between 2009 and 2013 under the overall title “Raum” (“Space”) (Figs. 48–60), and which from 2011 onwards were accompanied by a series of “Studien” (“Studies”) completed in charcoal in a smaller format (Figs. 61–69), appear as dwellings for individuals who remain unknown. Both series show precisely defined foundation walls, shafts, ramps, possibly cellars, bunkers, segments of labyrinths, open and enclosed spaces. They are structures in which building has started and then come to a halt, relics of settlements or plans, and they embody a state between the past and the future. Also shown from a bird’s-eye perspective, but at a closer distance, they, too, remain empty of people. The colours, which are more intense than those in the “Farblandschaften”, alter within certain colour spectra between red and earth tones, blue, green and yellow in order to point to a position in the landscape. Translucent preliminary drawings and geometric lines applied with a scraper indicate professionally constructed buildings. The black-and-white charcoal studies with their cool appearance look even more like architectural designs. The renewed abandonment of literary titles by the artist, and his decision to work through the same theme over a span of many years, hints at a metaphorical approach to the subject of the images. Architecture defines the position of the individual within the reference systems of society. In Bresinski’s architectural structures and spaces, psychological states are clearly manifest, as is the sense of being trapped in systems of human existence, even though possibilities of escape are available. It appears as though the artist, in the numerous versions that he has created, is in search of the “ideal form”[32] of a universally present prison, which houses life’s constraints, yearnings and flights in equal measure.

For the title of his major solo exhibition that followed his receipt of the art prize of the town of Limburg (“Kunstpreis der Stadt Limburg”) in 2012, Bresinski chose a line from the collection of poems “L’État d’ébauche” (1951) by the surrealist writer Noël Arnaud (1919–2003): “Ich bin der Raum wo ich bin” (“I am the space where I am”).[33] Spaces forge identities, according to the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) in his “Poetics of Space” (1958), although one’s own “self” only becomes apparent after one has broken out of the space.[34] Accordingly, Bresinski’s firmly morticed “spaces” – head-high chambers – are never entirely cut off from the outside world, but leave the “self” opportunities for escape. For the artist, this means perhaps escaping from architecture and returning into the landscape. “In Jan Bresinski’s pictorial spaces, everything is always in the transitional state of becoming and fading away,” writes Jürgen Röhrig in the exhibition catalogue: “Finding one’s place within them is a more complex task than hiding in a chamber: the space where I am is not an enclosed area.”[35] 

In this exhibition, however, “I am the space where I am” also stood as an overall title for the previous groups of works produced since 1992. Referring to earlier image series, Röhrig wrote: “On these panels, different models test the space, explore the field of movement. In it there are false paths, displacements and transitions. That which is inside is now something to be discovered, recovered.” Indeed, Bresinski’s “self” and his creativity are nourished by residing and fleeing: from the city into the landscape, from the settlement structures hidden in the cultivated landscape to the history and future of the megacities, from the nature forms of gardens to the geometric systems of the landscape designer, from that which is hidden “inside” (“inwändig”) to the unprotected, exposed settlements that are visible from outer space, from the enclosed space back into nature.