Jan Bresinski. New directions in landscape painting

Nature as universal space
 

It therefore appears entirely logical that after engaging with the carefully planned forms of architectural spaces for several years, after 2015, Bresinski should turn to pure nature, as it were to the other extreme of the span of his work, which extends between settlement space and cultivated landscape. The direct reason for the series of paintings (Figs. 70–87) entitled “Dickicht” (“Thicket”) which were created from this point on was a trip to the Uckermark [a region in north-eastern Germany – translator’s note]. While there, Bresinski made a journey by boat into wide open fields of reeds, from which he “returned a different person”, in the words of Małgorzata Matzke in 2017 at the opening of an exhibition in the Modern Art Showroom (M.A.SH) gallery in Remagen.[36] For two weeks, the artist had travelled the abandoned course of the Oder river with its vast reed beds when he visited Schwedt for an artists’ symposium.[37] He continued his walks through nature in the environment from which he came, the river landscape near Windeck and Eitorf, saying that he felt drawn to wild thickets.[38] He was interested in those spaces created by nature with its growth, and which he defined anew in his paintings with dramatic differences in light. The spatial impact between foreground, depth of picture and views through into the distances appears to extend into the gallery space in exhibitions of his works.[39] However, when representing the real-life forms, the leaves, stalks, twigs and branches, which are modelled on nature and its growth processes, he works – as he did previously with his landscapes, urban views and images of built spaces – with schematic designs, the form repertoire of which is created in his studio. His “thickets” are idealised images and thought patterns, impressions of a universal nature which require completion from the experiential world of the observer. 

These paintings, too, shown in front view, are almost inconceivable without the schematised “All-over” of abstract art – such as the “drippings” of Jackson Pollock. However, nature as a model, with its dynamic and expansion into two- and three-dimensional space, prevents any rigidification into a decorative ornament. Again, one senses the artist’s interest in material and form, in a wide range of painting techniques to be tested anew time and again. The painting structure, consisting of numerous glazes and covering layers of paint lying one on top of the other, with forms carved, scratched and scraped into the still damp paint, the use of monotype and the interplay between positive and negative image references produce a universal, paradigmatic image of nature. In these paintings, Matzke saw a “reaction to what is now happening in the world”, to the current environmental debate. In the current “politically precarious situation,” Bresinski feels that nature doesn’t lie to us, that it is “the only thing on which we can rely.”[40] 

In 2017, Bresinski received a commission, together with the Zimbabwean artist Charles Bhebe (*1979), for a wall mural on the Gymnasium am Löhrtor grammar school in Siegen. Entitled “Weltbaustelle Siegen” (“World Improvement Area Siegen”), the purpose was to represent sustainability as part of the “Eine Welt Netz NRW” (“One World Network NRW”).[41] Working with the pupils from the school, Bresinski painted a cold, natureless world consisting of concrete pillars, bridges, ramps and skyscrapers on the upper section of the wall, while Bhebe filled the lower half with people standing up to their chest in water, fighting for survival. “Our idea was to portray the clash between the world of the banks and the real world and its demise,” Bresinski explained in an interview with the Polish channel of Deutsche Welle: “Above the world by which we are dominated, and below, simple people trying to save the things they love and cherish. We are all victims of world events.” The project highlighted a global concept of equal rights.[42] 

The work produced by Jan Bresinski to date constitutes a complex, self-contained, carefully worked-through contribution to landscape painting. It is inspired by 20th century art currents such as Art Informel, Land Art, modern object art, more precisely, Minimal Art and installation, and incorporates influences from photography and basic principles of Action Painting. Nevertheless, for this artist, landscape painting, to which no particular significance has otherwise been ascribed in the development of contemporary art since the end of the Second World War, is of primary importance, be it as an artistic reflection of the cultivated landscape, the urban landscape or focused phenomena such as reconstructed space and the direct natural environment. Certainly, Bresinski was motivated by ideas from the Post-Impressionist movement, but also by the perceptions of the landscape that prevailed throughout the 19th century from the Romantic era onwards: as an expression of feeling and a general reflection of human existence, and as a place of hope, anticipation and desire as well as of latent danger. These sentiments still have contemporary ramifications. Nature in its seemingly wild state is perceived as a healing force against the existential threat unleashed by humankind. However, the artistic treatment of nature ultimately reveals it as a structured substrate after all; it remains a place of longing and a danger zone in equal measure. To this extent, Bresinski’s painting remains highly relevant.

Axel Feuß, August 2019

Artist’s websites:

http://www.bresinski.de/
http://design.bresinski.de/

Bibliography:

im Fluss. Eine Kunstaktion an der Sieg bei Herchen, published by: Sparkassenstiftung für den Rhein-Sieg-Kreis, Siegburg 1999

Continuum. Jan Bresinski, exhibition catalogue, Kunst-Spektrum GKK, Krefeld, and Dom Polonii, Kraków, 2001

SPIELART. Jan Bresinski, Karl-Heinz Heming, Hermann J. Kassel, Anne Mangeot, Benoit Tremsal, exhibition catalogue, published by: Sparkassenstiftung für den Rhein-Sieg-Kreis, Siegburg 2002

Jan Bresinski. Land/Über/Gang, exhibition catalogue, Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn, published by: Frank Günter Zehnder, Bonn 2002 

Jan Bresinski. Atlas bezdroży, exhibition catalogue, Mazowieckie Centrum Kultury i Sztuki w Warszawie, Warsaw 2007

Jan Bresinski. Ich bin der Raum wo ich bin, exhibition catalogue, Kunstsammlungen der Stadt Limburg, 2012

Staffellauf. Zwei Absolventengenerationen der Kunstakademie Katowice, exhibition catalogue, Kunstverein Kreis Gütersloh et al, curator: Dorota Kabiesz, [Warsaw 2013], page 22–25