André Butzer
11 Sep - 13 Oct 2012
ANDRÉ BUTZER
10 September - 13 October 2012
Galerie Bernd Kugler is delighted to announce its fifth solo exhibition in Innsbruck of the work of André Butzer (b. 1973 in Stuttgart). The new small and medium-format pieces shown are all so-called N-paintings and represent the current culmination of this series.
The work of the abstract painter, André Butzer has been characterised – right from its earliest beginnings in the late 1990s - by the great creative risks taken by the artist, both in formal terms and in respect of subject matter. The public has come to believe that he puts everything at stake, whereas, in fact, the contrary is true. The assurance with which Butzer advances on his pathway is astounding, although in retrospect, the steps he takes always seem completely natural, with anything else being inconceivable. His work to date consists of gaudy, bright, expressive impasto paintings, populated by caricature-like elves of industry, abstracted products from the German past and the American cultural colonisation of the 20th century. In his technoid paintings, electric cables ran across the pictorial space, structures like circuit boards emerged from paint masses. Butzer finally arrived at a point where he was producing images of extreme materiality, in which paint represented itself alone. From the first painting onwards, an examination of the rudiments and possibilities afforded by painting was amongst his themes, whereby it must be said that André Butzer is one of the few contemporary painters who dominates the canvas without recourse to irony. For Butzer, N (N=Nasaheim) stands for an imagined, Utopian, artistic place, in which colour is kept. N has been a feature of his work for years, but it is a realm that can never be entered. All painting is merely an approximation of it.
Butzer made a brilliant move when he drove abstraction and the elimination of illusionistic pictorial means forwards with the sudden production of his first N-painting in 2010, a grey monolith, 4.5 metres high and entitled, Ich will erst mal ́ne Cola [First, I’d like a cola]. This was an elementary, progressive leap, which few would have believed he had the courage to make. Butzer broke away from the sumptuous, colourful paintings belonging to his oeuvre thus far, taking a pathway away from a primary chromaticity, in favour of one characterised by potential. Two forms are to be found on this apparently grey canvas: black lines, which themselves create planes. Both of them represent elementary, creative facts: the relationship between above and below, verticality and horizontality. An analogy with life (verticality) and death (horizontally) may be made. Like co-ordinates (following N), Butzer has to set these matrices anew for every painting, and it is not so long ago that they were perilously approaching the edges of the image. The putative grey of this painting and the subsequent N-paintings is, however, not a monochrome grey; it is painstakingly created out of paint, until it covers the entire canvas. It is white, platinum, black, silver, shiny and matt, in this sense representing potential colour. Grey has been present in the work of Butzer, ever the colourist, from the time of his first paintings, and for him it signifies the potentiality of chromaticity. The grey of the early N-paintings, which also encompassed primary colours, gradually became lighter, and, in fact, the paintings now being shown at the Galerie Kugler are the first images no longer to contain any form of temporal grey, an exaggerated, full, cosmic white instead dominating. This is about a play of light, half-tones and oscillation. This potential chromaticity has no historical precedent and may be enlisted as a vision of sight itself (it has to be asked at this point whether the term ‘abstract painting’ any longer applies). In parallel with this calculated exaggeration, the black zones within the pictorial space are increasingly extensive, creating an asymmetrical equilibrium. Both planes, the light one and the black one, are equally created out of paint, the consonance and enhanced contrast between black and white thus produced being chromatic and tempered.
The formal reticence of these images (a feature despite the density of paint) should not belie the fact that André Butzer has created new conditions and possibilities with this leap towards the potentiality of colour and an extreme visual recalculation of painting for the future.
Markus Gugatschka,
External Advisory Officer,
FRIEDENS-SIEMENSE CO.
Austria
10 September - 13 October 2012
Galerie Bernd Kugler is delighted to announce its fifth solo exhibition in Innsbruck of the work of André Butzer (b. 1973 in Stuttgart). The new small and medium-format pieces shown are all so-called N-paintings and represent the current culmination of this series.
The work of the abstract painter, André Butzer has been characterised – right from its earliest beginnings in the late 1990s - by the great creative risks taken by the artist, both in formal terms and in respect of subject matter. The public has come to believe that he puts everything at stake, whereas, in fact, the contrary is true. The assurance with which Butzer advances on his pathway is astounding, although in retrospect, the steps he takes always seem completely natural, with anything else being inconceivable. His work to date consists of gaudy, bright, expressive impasto paintings, populated by caricature-like elves of industry, abstracted products from the German past and the American cultural colonisation of the 20th century. In his technoid paintings, electric cables ran across the pictorial space, structures like circuit boards emerged from paint masses. Butzer finally arrived at a point where he was producing images of extreme materiality, in which paint represented itself alone. From the first painting onwards, an examination of the rudiments and possibilities afforded by painting was amongst his themes, whereby it must be said that André Butzer is one of the few contemporary painters who dominates the canvas without recourse to irony. For Butzer, N (N=Nasaheim) stands for an imagined, Utopian, artistic place, in which colour is kept. N has been a feature of his work for years, but it is a realm that can never be entered. All painting is merely an approximation of it.
Butzer made a brilliant move when he drove abstraction and the elimination of illusionistic pictorial means forwards with the sudden production of his first N-painting in 2010, a grey monolith, 4.5 metres high and entitled, Ich will erst mal ́ne Cola [First, I’d like a cola]. This was an elementary, progressive leap, which few would have believed he had the courage to make. Butzer broke away from the sumptuous, colourful paintings belonging to his oeuvre thus far, taking a pathway away from a primary chromaticity, in favour of one characterised by potential. Two forms are to be found on this apparently grey canvas: black lines, which themselves create planes. Both of them represent elementary, creative facts: the relationship between above and below, verticality and horizontality. An analogy with life (verticality) and death (horizontally) may be made. Like co-ordinates (following N), Butzer has to set these matrices anew for every painting, and it is not so long ago that they were perilously approaching the edges of the image. The putative grey of this painting and the subsequent N-paintings is, however, not a monochrome grey; it is painstakingly created out of paint, until it covers the entire canvas. It is white, platinum, black, silver, shiny and matt, in this sense representing potential colour. Grey has been present in the work of Butzer, ever the colourist, from the time of his first paintings, and for him it signifies the potentiality of chromaticity. The grey of the early N-paintings, which also encompassed primary colours, gradually became lighter, and, in fact, the paintings now being shown at the Galerie Kugler are the first images no longer to contain any form of temporal grey, an exaggerated, full, cosmic white instead dominating. This is about a play of light, half-tones and oscillation. This potential chromaticity has no historical precedent and may be enlisted as a vision of sight itself (it has to be asked at this point whether the term ‘abstract painting’ any longer applies). In parallel with this calculated exaggeration, the black zones within the pictorial space are increasingly extensive, creating an asymmetrical equilibrium. Both planes, the light one and the black one, are equally created out of paint, the consonance and enhanced contrast between black and white thus produced being chromatic and tempered.
The formal reticence of these images (a feature despite the density of paint) should not belie the fact that André Butzer has created new conditions and possibilities with this leap towards the potentiality of colour and an extreme visual recalculation of painting for the future.
Markus Gugatschka,
External Advisory Officer,
FRIEDENS-SIEMENSE CO.
Austria