«Life is like a painting;

to appear beautiful, it must be seen from a distance.»

(Gustave Flaubert, «Jules and Henry»)

Since the space age at the latest, humankind has been capable of deciphering our planet from above, and it is but a question of time before national identities and administrative structures satisfy global demands. The popularization and interdependence of communication structures magically spirits the cosmos into the living rooms of the world. Just push the button. Media overkill is apparently inevitable. Increasingly atomized knowledge necessitates increasingly atomized patterns of perception and implicitly encourages addiction to smaller and smaller units of investigation. Particle research may serve to illustrate this rampant tendency towards unlimited fragmentation of the sciences, and the collision between qualitative and quantitative theories of growth has, for the first time, signalled a fundamental change of paradigms in economics and politics. Transparence and complexity exemplify the most powerful paradox of the twentieth century.

The world of images has increasingly served the ends of this inexorable development. The popularization of the means of production, from photography and film to television and video, has opened up unprecedented perspectives for the makers of images. Consumers, on the other hand, are faced with the daunting task of stemming the pictorial tide through selective and structured seeing because so-called postmodernism has subverted all stylistic canons, and its exaltation of ''anything goes" has deprived the beholder of didactic orientation. Particularism, eclecticism, and fragmentary production are the artistic hallmarks of this decade.

The work of Zurich artist Felix Brunner has emerged within the framework of this cultural context. The pull between chaos and order that informs his work forcefully demonstrates the paradox between transparence and complexity: Felix Brunner's œuvre is a last call for dis­course. His painting is both expressively gestural and conceptual; it abides in the fragment and toys with art-historical attitudes. His ''painterly concept" rests on the fundamental insight that unity and fragment as well as chaos and order are intimately related, and can, in fact, generate each other.

Layers of paint are piled monumentally on the coarse canvas and overlay its textured structure. Hundreds of thousands of pigments go into one single layer; they form a physical presence and are the constitutive elements of this synthetic reality. Again and again the artist confronts his viewers with the same superimposed layers of figuration and abstraction, form and ground, structure and disorder, emotion and reason. In consequence, viewers can only guess at the presence of overpainted layers of paint, hidden from the human eye. This approach articulates the project-like character of Felix B runner's œuvre, which resembles the questing exploration of scientific research. However, instead of seeking substantiation in the evidence of scientific logic, he deals in the descriptive confrontation of the seemingly familiar and accepted in an unusual context. Ritualized patterns of reception, visual topi and canons, irritating moments are juxtaposed on equal footing. The mysterious contrasts with the obvious, the contoured shape with formlessness. The viewer is struck by technical components that would seem to stand for the appearance of figuration – fragments of gears, dotted grids, door handles, cubes, typographical elements or spherical shapes. Yet, the painterly texture of the back- and underground can only be read abstractly and defies clear-cut identification.

On the other hand, by changing our vantage point and moving close to the canvas to examine the originally figurative shapes, we see them mutate into the same abstract, gestural textures that we seemed to have identified in the background. This interplay between adjoining, overlapping, overlayered abstraction and figuration underscores the mutual dependence, indeed the necessary coexistence, of these supposedly irreconcilable concepts. The fluctuation between transparence and complexity in Felix Brunner's painting ultimately calls for dispensing with these categorizing boundaries, and advances a dialectical approach that clearly rejects the isolating particularism of traditional studies in style. "Can you see me," asks the relief-like piece on view at the Shedhalle. The rhetorical question in Braille lettering quintessentially exposes what the pseudo-scholarship of effete art reception has been trying to conceal for decades. The configuration, made out of Legos, with easily recognizable structures, forms, and surfaces, can easily be viewed as a purely optical phenomenon, especially since not many viewers will be able to read Braille and translate the verbal message of the oracle. They are therefore compelled to focus exclusively on the visual presence of the work. Like a blind person, they are required to touch the relief, to finger and thus "grasp" its recesses, its raised dots, and the coolness of its material. The pictorial character can be read neither as pure objectification nor as prototypical representation because the work's functional and aesthetic presence forces the beholder to employ the same mechanism of perception as a blind person – only then can it be experienced in its totality.

Catalog text: Christoph Doswald

Translation: Catherine Schelbert