Alfonso Artiaco is pleased to announce the representation of the German artist Andreas Breunig presenting his first solo show at the gallery and in Italy titled L’informazione e i suoi apparati.
Andreas Breunig presents two series of works on canvas which study the role of the information in the nowadays society. His works at first sight may seem pure pictorial gesture, but it is precisely that same gesture that in reality underlies a serial and objective research. Information is inevitably a victim of interpretation. Its origin could be science or just common belief. So notions are able to produce different outlets, especially in the current generation, which is based on picture. The artist tries to find a new way of transmission without losing meaning but trying to describe what is happening.
The first corpus of works, entitled EXTANT (extended), stands out for its bold search for meaning within the surfaces and levels of the canvas: making its background visible, revealing the difference between the canvas and its base. The layering of the works and the overlapping of several layers bring Breunig’s painting closer to digital processing techniques. As artificial intelligence also his painting goes through modular and repetitive phases made of self-imposed rules. The colour backgrounds and two-dimensional shapes delete the illusion of a three-dimensional space and cause a split between close-ups and backgrounds emphasizing space. This innovative approach to painting creates a visual experience in which the viewer is invited to explore the art in depth, to look for the point where the surface becomes visible. Of the canvas you can thus notice the individual pictorial elements, the one-dimensional contours, the strokes and the subtle shades of colour, which assume the role of variable objects arranged on the plane. Information becomes a medium, a different value increase system.
In the second series Protest Paintings/Miller-Urey Paintings it reveals itself as an approach to the formation of protests. Knowing allows us to develop that critical sense which underlies any type of opposition to a system. So these shapes, with defined contours in the background, almost reminiscent of the life forms seen under the microscope, are pervaded by colours and forms that sometimes lead to more sinuous and articulate figures, other times pure splashes of colour without apparent references. Are the notions that allow to analyze a work, as well as an entire social, political or cultural context. It is information that shapes individuals and makes them what they are. Here comes the reference to the experiment of the chemist Stanley Miller and his professor, the Nobel Prize winner Harold Urey. The experiment in the mid-1950s demonstrated that inorganic molecules under the right environmental conditions could produce organic molecules, the creation of life. Life, as well as knowledge, is born even in the most unexpected places, becoming a generating force of ideas.
In his paintings the artist recreates that particular condition, the brushstrokes become original elements that, if placed in the right context, in the shape of the birth, discover the possibility of starting to be.
