Opening Saturday 24 MATTHIAS BRANDES 17

Curated by VALERIA TASSINARI
MAGI’900 Museum - Pieve di Cento, Bologna
DAL 24 MATTHIAS BRANDES 20 May 2018

The subjects of Brandes' painting are a handful of recurring and repeated themes, probing traditional genres, MATTHIAS BRANDES, those silent drawers of memory where he himself classifies them with care, always moving them in a timeless suspension, in a time-place indifferent to any variable.
But where does it spread from, then, that light that activates the skin and peel, defines the geometry of the shapes, softens colors, draw the chiaroscuro, thickens the shadow in the corners of the architecture and in the corners of the gazes? It is not a question of vision, of transient lighting. The light is absolutely there, as in absolute there are forms, the things we have known.
After fifty years of research - an important goal that generally does not leave artists unscathed, pushing them to an overall critical reinterpretation of their own path - Brandes is also ready to carefully read his journey into figuration, a path without derailments, guided by the classical tools of tempera and oil painting and drawing, mastered thanks to a solid technique and a sensitive analysis of twentieth-century art.
Starting with the suggestions of post-war Italian Realism of the early days, Brandes chooses his direction, starting from Guttuso's youthful fascination for "social" painting and pop objectivity, from which he soon distances himself,to soar in a more anachronistic and metaphysical dimension, which will mark the emotional tone of all his work. It will be a secluded and counter-current path, immediately in contrast with the context of the Hamburg Academy, where it was formed in the early seventies, between conceptual experiences, even extreme ones, with respect to which he feels a radical strangeness, even though on the theoretical level he was urged to have a critical relationship with the painting of the avant-gardes.

They are ready, in those years, the themes and compositional schemes that will return until today: the accumulations, the repetitions, inclinations, the architectural compositions of still lifes on the horizontal planes, the shadow cuts. Nothing immediate, of visceral. All declined by an emotionality praised, if anything, in the memory, how decanted the colors appear, i gesti, the expectations of apparitions in the empty spaces.
archaeologist and cartographer, further intensified by the 1990s, alternates free creation with private clients, a bourgeois tradition that is part of an authentic vision of the painter's profession, not banally anchored to profit but brought back to its highest vocation of intimate dialogue with the public.

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