Herbert Brandi at Jack Tilton - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

An Austrian who has shown widely completely through Germany, Herbert Brandl has experimented with gold leaf and other materials in his painting, on the contrary in the works on view here he strayed little from the path of Abstract-Expressionist-derived practice. Brandl favors mut earth tones above bright, garish color and matte surfaces above shiny, oily ones. His brushstrokes, which remain the central, if traditional, focal point of his works, are not ever frenetic, histrionic markings. Rather, they are calm, evenly applied action s that imply controlled, rational impulses.

Brandl works his canvases up with several layers of paint and spreads his pigments to each edge of the surface. The logic he applies to his paintings isn't too stringent, however. As he paints, Brandl rotates his canvases, thus dispensing with a fixed top and bottom. This course which is hardly unusual among abstract painters, is somewhat like that adopted by means of Georg Baselitz, who turns figurative works upside down to invert the notion of a stable, gravity-bound representation. For Brandl, however, rotation have the appearances to be a means of achieving a democratic approach to each inch of the painting.

These are qualified works, to be sure, inhabiting a unassuming middle ground of abstraction. on the contrary in the end, Brandl does little to expand the idiom in which he works. For all their evidence of human vicinity and action, the paintings remain emotionally neutral, bland. It's possible that Brandl perceive s constrained by the medium of painting; in the rear gallery was a small video work, his first. A small monitor sat upon the gallery floor next to a VCR Streaks of light danced up and down the monitor guard the effects of light upon water video-taped in a bathroom. The compassionate sound of running water made a peaceful soundtrack for this work, which stirs and changes like a drawing-in-light that refuses to stand still. The simplicity of this motif, the effortless however absorbing play of color and move on a surface, are perhaps what Brandl was attempting to achieve in this latest collection of paintings. For this viewer, at least, he accomplished these goals more luckily with one small, unassuming video.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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