HERBERT BRANDL

Curator: Elisabeth Thoman- Oberhofer, Innsbruck

Just like a Cinemascope the monumental canvases of the Panorama series reach out into the horizontal. The title of the cycle, Herbert Brandl began to work on in 2000, promises the illusionary. With a panorama we associate, for instance, the appearance of a mountain range or a city skyline, in any case something relating to an actual visual phenomenon – the sight of an event linked to reality.

Brandl’s portraits are ambivalent, resisting straightforward perception and analysis. They vacillate between object-relatedness and abstraction. How deceptive the romantic aspect of the sunset, the raging scenarios of the cloud formations and the dry lightning in the panel. Fiery red, sfumato-like veiling, and sunlight laboriously breaking through the diffuse atmosphere.  

The extremely wide picture format quickly draws the observer into the action, right-hand and left-hand picture margin vanishing out of focus – one is inside the picture just as one is used to from the cinema. The square TV screen is replaced by a visual sweep enabling us to enter into a second reality. Yet, the naturalist illusionism of Brandl’s panoramas is promptly broken – broken by the painting itself, its standing its ground against the object to be depicted, which is nature. Deliberately there are no horizons in any of the works. The picture, appearing as a study in colour, gains advanced autonomy. Wherever a semblance of depth might come through Brandl counteracts it with a cool brushstroke, by distempering the sunlight gleam or the atmospheric mists. Paint runs down the canvas and thus even betrays the factual flatness of the medium painting. The painter intentionally leaves splashes of paint as a mark of the production process. The routinely composed masterpiece is not his primary intention. On the other hand we can make out a wonderful subtleness in the painting per se. Paint consequently is not paint but transformed matter creating depth, density, atmosphere – set down offhandedly, without too much wilful wielding of the painting tool. Brandl’s stance to painting is a decidedly open one granting the medium a very wide spectrum. He does not curb himself with conceptual strategies or with rehearsed and casually presented masterpieces soon succumbing to stagnation through routine. Each untreated canvas is a new challenge – uncertain, but undertaken with the history of painting ever in mind.