Glue

Do painters have the right to do everything? Meaning: to put coral blue and natural wine purple with touches of goose-poop green? Or an owl-headed cat (dog?) with horses’ hooves, against a yellow monochrome, fooled by touches of gray, brown, and blue? With a touch of red, too? The head of a monkey, or a lion in a fish? A cat in a psychedelic composition of a punk purple and a creamy gray? The same Ikea sofa the young heterosexual couple bought together; normative happiness. I guess that’s the point, no? To mention what is normative. What fits peacefully into the story. What jolts, what hurts. This image of the Golden Retriever echoing a kind of Weimar Braque. The pretty house behind the white picket fence, with the garden lawn perfectly cut. Occasional tinsel at Christmas, and the best decorations on the block during Halloween.

The joy of gardening, perhaps. A dad who works 45 minutes away from home by public transport and understands the beauty of a Sunday: planting cauli#ower with his daughter in their pretty garden. A summer’s day. Perhaps the beginning of spring. The open window in the kitchen. An eclipse. The earth approaching the sun. A man sleeping outside. A horse unleashed in the city streets. A building in the middle of a field. A Golden Retriever raising its head, tilting its ears upwards at the sight of a stranger approaching the fence. The postman.

In a press release written a few years ago, Vittorio Brodmann’s paintings were mentioned as possessing ‘a soothing and relaxed effect, yet despite their lightness, they are anything but innocent.’ Brodmann knows what makes a hero, and knows even more how to turn him into a comedian. As a goof, a prank. A joke, perhaps. Something built against mythology. Something that knows the extraordinary and whose value is repugnant, almost abject. That desires something else.

For a long time, Brodmann dedicated his practice to small works. Condensed gestures in intimate scenarios. It’s only recently that he started concentrating on bigger formats. The ones presented in ‘Glue’ unravel as stages. In the end, the subjects are the same, and as much detail is given to the larger formats as to the smaller ones. The colors are equally vivid in all of them; from a bright red to a creamy white, from a naive green to a sympathetic pink, a furtive yellow, a melancholy gray, a shy turquoise.

Painting, anyway, has its own will, its own demands. And the artist tries to understand its problems, playing with logic. The medium of participation; that it’s easy to say that one is beautiful and another is ugly, and that the latter is so ugly that we could have painted it ourselves. How meaning is constructed. In Glue, this is achieved by collage, a cut-and-paste that is not necessarily conceptual but rather process-oriented. As if to go beyond physical law, within a mutation. Like editing. Combining figures coming from various sources: historical paintings, Google search, or the artist’s own drawings. In this sense, the artist also positions himself as a spectator of his own work. And this is dramatic too.

In this case, painting is existential, absurd with what constitutes the pattern of life: subjects are short stories, quickly cut to camera, while never understood in the scope of a large novel. The figures are comical. Each of them interchanges with another; compositions of beings and individuals mutating together, questioning their place in a changing environment. Isolated. At least, something that has to do with the question of civilization, and what accounts for a given context in which a relationship is imposed, sought, or avoided. A principle of equity and exchange. A pause; the comic spectacle of a social conflict in which everything is subject to negotiation, exchange, agreement. A contract. Voilà, a contract.

— Hugo Bausch Belbachir

Vittorio Brodmann (b. 1987, Ettingen, Switzerland) lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Kunstraum Schwaz (Austria); Galerie Gregor Staiger (Milan); Nuremberg Kunstverein (Nuremberg); Sant’Andrea de Scaphis (Rome); Kunsthaus Baselland (Basel); Freedman Fitzpatrick (Los Angeles); Galerie Gregor Staiger (Zurich); Kunsthalle Bern (Bern); Halle für Kunst (Lüneburg); Gavin Brown’s enterprise (New York); Truth & Consequences (Geneva), and 21er Haus Belvedere (Vienna). Group exhibitions include exhibitions at Kölnischer Kunstverein (Köln); Fri Art Kunsthalle Fribourg (Switzerland); Frans Hals Museum (Haarlem); Kunsthalle Palazzo (Liestal); MAMCO (Geneva); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Zurich); Swiss Institute (New York); Stuart Shave / Modern Art (London); The Approach (London); Badischer Kunstverein (Karlsruhe); Halle für Kunst (Lüneburg); Kunsthalle Bern (Bern), amongst others. A monograph publication of his work, Water under the Bridge, was printed on the occasion of his solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern by Walther Koenig.