Fritz Bornstück: You Are Here (X)

In our misdirected age it seems a rare immunity to wan- der abroad without an allocated or determined sense of final destination. Yet as the figures in the current series of Fritz Bornstück paintings sojourn on arrested journey or a voyage into nature, at the same time they carry with them the material accretions of the world, the used, abused, and abject consumer objects that they might reasonably have left behind.

Bornstück is a painter-sculptor who creates paintings with a highly personal sense of simultaneity between his imagined subject matter and the material application of paint. As is familiar from his unique studio practice, the latest series of paintings evoke feelings of conjured imagining and investigative uses of facture, figurative images with the mastery of painterly means and material procedures needed to accomplish them. We might see in these new paintings an attempt at visual synthesis between subject and object, the prescient subject a journeying figure on a quest inferring a forward projection, and objects seen often as indexical emblems of memorial nostalgia and/ or junk-shop obsolescence.

The pictorial use of layered material accumulation and juxtaposition, with anthropomorphic associations, has been part of the artist’s studio practice from the very outset, and dates from his early studies when he was an avid collector of detritus, discarded objects, and materials considered junk. Many of Bornstück’s early works took the form of painting bricolage, that is to say visually juxtaposed elements that became surreal paintings of a literary persuasion, as in ONE FOR THE BIRDS (2015), a visual pun perhaps on Gericault’s famous ‘Raft…’ and works like INSIDE GAMES ON THE OUTSIDE, or in the witty interplay on the tradition of the triptych YOU NEVER COME CLOSER (2015), where object-based figures are painted to the right and left yet the central panel has no representative image. But in the last decade the work has become more subtle and sophisticated, akin to visual palimpsests, paintings with accumulative collated layers of pictured temporalities (not collage) and memories of association. In speaking of the palimpsest, we are evoking the philosophical aesthetic of the trace, where what appears hidden (erased) re-emerges to become a new form in the imagination and in the creative act of making. As once noted by Merleau-Ponty quoting Cézanne, “nature is on the inside”, and “quality, light, colour, depth which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our bodies and because the body welcomes them”. As a result, the palimpsest and ‘trace’ intimates how materials and objects of association revive speculative imagined histories by recollected consciousness and individual memories and associations.
Mark Gisbourne, 2024

Kilde:
Galerie Mikael Andersen