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For all its being unmistakable Herbert Brandl's oeuvre, as far its surfaces go, is very diverse. It hovers between traditional motifs like flowers , landscapes, or mountains on the one hand and non-representational textures and planes on the other; as well as between nearly sculptural masses of oil paint and watercolour-like, almost immaterial hues or huge, black and white works in Indian ink on paper. During a first group exhibition in the early eighties an unframed canvas, 4.2 by 2.4 meters, crammed into the space at hand, formed the centre of an installation situation in which the painting material, abundant inside the picture, spread throughout the gallery space. Thick, seemingly dirty paint covered the canvas and became a rudimentary system of signs that, beyond the two-dimensional, referred to painting as activity and action in three-dimensional space. In precise contrast to the "wild" painting in vogue at the time this was not a work in search for the autonomous panel thus aiming to deliberately distance itself from non-painterly artistic practice. It was much rather an attempt to define painting inside a context encompassing and processing conceptual installation or action1st techniques. The materiality of the colour here is being set against figurative content. Yet not, and this is relevant for Brandi's entire work there alter, in the sense that this materiality were to replace content, Le. become a means of abstraction. Even in these early works it becomes obvious that he will never be about deciding between figure and the potentials of the medium, reaching as far as the monochrome, or to formulate any decisions at all at this stage pointing into one direction or the other. >>
>> In other paintings of those years, when figures reminding us of Art Brut once again superimpose each other before a complex background, these seemingly abstract signs themselves become a part of a totally different abstraction or figure and in this way are embedded in the picture in a manner that makes it impossible to regard them as either the starting or the end point of a figuration or abstraction. With the flower pictures and landscapes painted during the same years much of the same applies: It don't seem to be brushstroke, colour and texture that distort an image of nature, are drowned out by the subjective points of view of the artist. The figures, rather, often seem to arrive in the picture only at the end of the artistic process, are therefore less a starting point than an end point. The images are never the reason for a picture. If a dark expanse takes up the bottom verge a landscape may become of it. The figure, as a result, Is not excluded but equally in no way compulsory and therefore laden with a secondary meaning at best. At the very next moment the swathes of colour and the shadings once again disperse in a way that makes it impossible to finally reconstruct a figure, a landscape. And still the artistic method, the internal grammar are visible in a forcefulness that makes it very hard indeed to draw a dividing line here. Since his pictures of the early eighties the relationship between figure and colour with Herbert Brandl has invariably been a very open and dynamic one and in the last instance one consistently is at a loss to determine what brings about what. One moment the painting generates a meaning and in the next covers it up again. In a picture from the year 1982 there is a dark green, almost black swathe through which, near the middle of the panel, bright yellow is shining and thus hinting at a centre. The line from dark green to yellow, though, again is broken by the mingling of the green with white paint that evokes much colder grey hues. The swathes of colour thus emerging on the one hand support the composition of the picture with its bright centre. >> weiter >>