Artist: Andreas Breunig

In the digital age, the generation of data, the exchange of information as well as the corrosion of content form the reflective core of Andreas Breunig’s artistic explorations. In an attempt to rediscover complex processes, the sciences and their cognitive devices sparked his fascination, biology in particularly became relevant in his field studies (networks).
Appearing light and sketch-like, their outlines are still noticeably accentuated. The forms are built by layering line upon line and induce trembling movements, as if the they were in permanent transmutation, as if a hidden process was shaping them. They evoke cellular pockets or, given the collaged-in photographs from mushroom identification guides, more likely fungi.
Breunig’s field studies position him as a researcher who observes and documents the specific conditions of a system. Like Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene or Anna Tsing’s matsutake mushroom theory, he substitutes fungi for the contemporary reality, in which intricate structures generate, store and distribute information. Thus, the artistic permutations aren’t mere metaphors for natural processes but act as visual translations of clandestine societal interactions—thereby short-circuiting contemporary painting and politics.

Yet instead of bluntly rejecting society, Breunig proposes moments of calm, allowing for introspection and absorption by the intrinsic movements of his Prediction / Analysis series. The cycle displays clearly cut canals and tracts that hint at a slow flow being processed through the painterly system’s varying cavities, loops and curls.
Breunig distances himself from the vibrant tones of our dazzling present in favor of a total pictorial existentialism. By bringing color to its essence of light and dark and reducing form to a bare minimum, he takes a decisive stance against today’s excessive overload of infinitely available information.
Due to the absence of apparent visual stimuli, Breunig reintroduces a stratification of knowledge. He redraws the boundaries between what is there and what is not, insisting on the critical analysis of information in order to regain the capability to distinguish and comprehend what might be true and what might be false.

Breunig’s Protest Paintings / Miller-Urey Paintings allude to organic and cellular forms. The painted plane becomes like a membrane and accommodates numerous particles. Blurred and perforated contours allow these particles to move freely within the confines of the pockets in which they are contained, while our gaze is pushed across the canvases along frantic brushwork, thereby connecting the unrelated elements and retracing the painterly composition.
The titular scientists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, recreated the primordial emergence of living molecules from inorganic matter in 1953. Breunig, however, shifts the focus from the chemical sensation to the social phenomenon of protest.
The consequential relationship between action and re-action becomes the »common thread« by which Breunig intertwines the various interpretative layers of the Protest Paintings / Miller-Urey Paintings. The energy required to create living particles and the societal acts of protest equal the eruptive movements and vibrant colors in painting. Every painterly gesture provokes its counterpart, just as the fabric of society is shaken when certain circumstantial conditions unfold.

Andreas Breunig processes the accumulation, interconnection and distribution of information. He creates contemplative spaces to reveal the hidden processes that determine our reality—because other than Frank Stella still believed in 1966, what we nowadays get to see, very rarely is what we really see.

Federica Carpenè