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. 

 

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.

 

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]

 

Bresinski worked on such “case studies”, artistic-aesthetic transformations of cultivated and settlement spaces in the landscape, in various series and individual pieces until 2007. First, in 2005, he created medium- to large-format acrylic paintings entitled “Geheimnis des Gärtners” (“Secret of the Gardener”) (Figs. 35–39), which are reminiscent of systematically designed garden grounds, with different vegetation and height levels, river courses and a network of paths, which – as is suggested by the overlaid geometric patterns – have been created from plans produced by humans. They show the typical landscape colours – green, blue, red-brown and ochre – and a vivid surface relief. He produced the series in Nieborów, to the west of Warsaw, where Nieborów Palace (Pałac w Nieborowie) with its baroque garden and the romantic Arkadia garden of Helena, Countess Radziwiłł/Helena Radziwiłłowa from around 1800 and the plans for the garden grounds contained in the archive there inspired Bresinski to create his paintings.[26] Other landscapes by the artist, which look as though they have been photographed from the air, are of his wanderings in the Italian Marches, the discovery of traces of Roman settlements between the Via Flaminia, the narrow Metauro river and the town of Villa del Monte to the south-west of Fano on the Adriatic coast, where he spends his holidays. In these, Röhrig says, “the fascination of these ancient structures and paths” is expressed.[27] 

In a series of black panels created in the period after 2004, Bresinski used thermoactive colour and heating wires to light up convoluted networks of paths (Figs. 40–42). Hung in multi-part sets or leaning at an angle against the wall in exhibitions entitled “Leuchtpfade” (“Light Paths”) in the Nümbrecht Art Society (Kunstverein Nümbrecht) and in the Kunst-Spektrum Krefeld, they are reminiscent of gestural works by Karl Otto Götz, the picture writing of Cy Twombly (1928–2011) which are not far removed from “Action Painting”, or of convoluted structures in Emil Schumacher’s paintings of the 1990s. They again unite informal material with Bresinski’s own form repertoire gained from the landscape. He had already worked with heat-responsive colour in 2002, with a series of “Thermopoetische Objekte” (“Thermopoetic Objects”). When the upper colour layer was touched, the standing display desks, which had surface areas that opened like books, showed linear landscape structures and poems by the Polish writers Zbigniew Herbert (1924–1998), Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) and Andrzej Stasiuk (*1960).[28]

With the “Megapolis” image series in 2006 (Figs. 43–45), Bresinski returned to urban structures, which unlike the birds-eye perspective in “Kraków” (Figs. 21–22) are presented from a much greater distance, such as from satellite images, and remain geographically undefined. The settlement patterns, which are grouped around a centre that remains empty, perhaps an estuary, a river delta or a port, are reminiscent of old megacities that expanded without a plan, such as Karachi. The title implies traces of historical settlements that are as old as the ancient Greek city states and which have survived until today, or cities with millions of inhabitants and metropolitan areas that have become conjoined, and which since the early 20th century have been known as “megalopolises”. In a text on Bresinski’s paintings, the poet and essayist Piotr Piaszczyński (*1955) wrote of “vast sprawling cities, huge formations, labyrinths, ghost towns – empty of people, eerie, abandoned”. He detected “a geometric nightmare”: “an urban landscape following a catastrophe; perhaps following a nuclear attack or a civilisational-demographic disaster”: “Who is the observer? It appears that it is not even a bird, as was the case in Jan’s earlier work. Rather, a bomber pilot (after the bombing raid). Or, highly likely, a cruel ‘eye’ of a satellite (which in effect is the same thing). These cities engender fear, we are shocked and disconcerted.”[29] 

One possible association could be the aerial photographs of Warsaw after it was destroyed by the Germans. The district of Muranów, where the former Jewish ghetto used to be, was now nothing more than an empty space after the area was blown up. Twelve years after it was created, the irregular structure of the city with its concentrically formed settlements in “Megapolis 3” (Fig. 45) are reminiscent of an aerial photograph taken in 2012 of the bombed-out Syrian city of Homs. The notion that settlement structures that have grown over thousands of years have been exposed and unprotected against destruction for an equal length of time, yet will continue to leave their mark on the Earth thus remains a certainty. The image series “Wüstenpolis” (“Desertpolis”) (2007, Figs. 46–48) shows architectural building outlines and elevations with vibrant colours, which in relation to the title could have been inspired by situations from historical desert cities such as Avdat in the Negev desert. Ruins, as well as witnesses to civilisational settlement that have been repeatedly built over and which continue to be used, appear here as vivid traces of individual and collective identity. In connection with the works created from 2001 onwards, which Bresinski showed in multiple exhibitions after 2006 under the collective title “Atlas der Irrwege/Atlas bezdroży” (“Atlas of Wrong Paths”),[30] he quotes from the poem “Raport z oblężonego miasta” (“Report from a Besieged City”) (1983) by Zbigniew Herbert: 

“all we have left is the place
our bonds with the place
still we hold the ruins of the temples
the ghosts of gardens and houses
if we lose the ruins, nothing remains
and if the city falls, and if one man survives
he shall carry the city inside himself
along the roads of banishment
he shall be the city.”[31]

 

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.

 

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