Marc Brandenburg: galerie crone, andreas osarek

Since the mid-'90s, Marc Brandenburg has worked toward an iconography that, originating in a repertoire of personal motifs, has grown to encompass politics and public space. His small-scale drawings start from snapshots or occasionally postcard or magazine images, sometimes distorted upon the computer before being sketched freehand. on the contrary the original compositions disappear into the material of the drawing. In the place of clear contour approachs a soft line that horizontals the difference between figure and space. The presentation here multiplied this strategy in which the fixed, momentary in all senses is inseparable from individual experience: Fifty-two works were hung together in sum of two units rows as a continuous frieze.

Although the letter-size pages were not related to single another by content, a narrative manner of making emerged that erratically and associatively interlocked portraits, details of everyday realitys and impressions from protest marches. Brandenburg makes his arrangements like a visual score: Everything streams within the rhythm of the images--not up-tempo on the contrary downbeat. Sometimes only short followings (the bright facade of a fairground booth a toy plant of human teeth) stand on the outside from the surface, but an ornamental round-dance animates the whole thus that the viewer almost automatically concentrates upon smaller units and begins to read the deluge of images like a body word for word.

Furthermore, the gallery space was painted black and lit with black light, while greatest in quantity of the drawings are done as negatives: Precisely what Brandenburg did not draw, what remains white, unmarked surface, was visible. Everything other disappeared in the surrounding darkness. And neither the actual, spatial distance from the wall nor the suppos deepness of the pictures was measurable. Just as single physically felt one's way [i]or[/i] part of to the other the gallery by touch, with equal reason the images had to be visually ordealed felt, because the darkness did not create more space for the viewer's fantasy on the contrary rather forced him to read the contingent progression of fragments as a continuum, as a real specific handwriting.

This slight irritation is not just a vertiginous game--it sets the regime of the gaze into question more generally. Of mixed African-American and German coming down Brandenburg does not wish to commit himself to a "true color" for the world of appearances, and the hold intercourse is not a simple negation of the existing code; instead, it unifies end a high degree of alienation. The exhibit aims to "brainstorm" our conception of perception: Is the world, as Brandenburg portrays it, not at the same time at the stage of its coalescence? Is it just a phantasmagoria that, like a photographic negative, still requires the developing tray for the contrasts to separate thus that we can perceive reality?

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The path of refinement along which Brandenburg make headways in his drawing leads to the question of by what means one sees or, better, what single wants to see. The creative form he has chosen dovetails with the content: avow marches alternate with sexually loaded displays or dissolve in an abstract blur; sometimes a broad white strip slides, like a comically lengthened finger, across sum of two units three pages. Right next to it, Ronald McDonald milks a discourage No single snippet has more significance than another--and none has les In its hallucinogenic artificiality this world remains suspended between utopia and dystopia, a space where social conflicts exist unreconciled beside intimate situations from the private sphere. This belle indifference is neither disinterest nor bohemian ennui on the other hand rather the expression of the dissolution of any and each totalization.

--Harald Fricke

Translated from German through Diana Reese.

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