20 Mar MATTHIAS BRANDES – Works since the ’80s
MATTHIAS BRANDES
Works since the ’80s
curated by Valeria Tassinari 03.23 – 05. 20. 2018
The subjects of Brandes’s paintings are a handful of recurring and repeated themes, which probe traditional genres, enter the archives of tradition, those silent memory drawers into which he himself accurately classifies them, always moving them in a timeless suspension, in a time-place that remains indifferent to all variables.
From where then does that light come that activates skin and peel, defines the geometry of shapes, softens the colours, draws the chiaroscuros, thickens the shadows at the edges of architectural works and in the corners of looks? It is not a question of vision or temporary illumination. Light is an absolute presence, just as absolute are also the shapes and things we have encountered.
After fifty years of searching – an important milestone that rarely leaves artists unscathed, pushing them to a critical global re-reading of their own path so far Brandes too is ready to carefully read his own journey in representation, a trip without derailments, guided by the classical tools of tempera and oil painting and of drawing, which he has mastered thanks to a solid technique and a sensitive analysis of twentieth century art.
Starting with the suggestions of the dawn of Italian post-war Realism, Brandes chooses his own directions, from his juvenile fascination for the “social” paintings of Guttuso and pop “objectivity”, from which he soon distances himself, to fly off into a more anachronistic and metaphysical dimension, which will then mark the emotional tone of all his work. His will be a solitary trip, against the mainstream, in contrast from the very start with the Hamburg Academy, which he attends in the early Seventies, among conceptual experiences that are sometimes even extreme and to which he feels a profound alienation, though being encouraged on the theoretical side towards a critical approach to avant-garde painting.
His work, further intensified from the Nineties, alternates between free creation and privately commissioned work, a bourgeois tradition which belongs to an authentic vision of the craft of the painter, not merely tied to profit but brought back to its highest vocation of intimate dialogue with the public.