WRITING ARCHIVE / Books / Essays
   
Buzz Spector (2009)
The Substance of Images: The Paintings of Brigitte Riesebrodt
 
Exhibition Catalog Essay: “The Substance of Images: The Paintings of Brigitte Riesebrodt,” Brigitte Riesebrodt: Paintings—Malerei, 2002-2006, 2007 (English and German translation)
 
http://www.royboydgallery.com/Riesebrodt/Riesebrodt.htm
 
Brigitte Riesebrodt, Piero’s Legend, 2006, oil and wax on wood, 36.5 x 46.5 x 4 inches
 
Brigitte Riesebrodt makes images by making things disappear. Her paintings are layers, accretions, accumulations of pigment that bury, obliterate, absorb, erase. These tactile surfaces cover the canvas and any prior layers the way that stucco covers brick, plaster covers lath, or the way that sediment covers a drying flood plain. Because they cover, they are exterior. They are walls, not spaces; they are earth, not landscapes. And beneath these richly varied surfaces, things disappear into memory.
They are surfaces, then, with a history: scraped, scratched, eroded, patched. Traces of hand-written text, fragments of images from newspapers and magazines, the peculiar orange-peel texture of paper laid over viscous paint and then peeled off, grainy expanses of delicately clotted and scumbled pigment. It takes time for the strata to form, and this process constructs a story. The compression of materials, the replacement of one surface with another, the changes of color, all happen sequentially, marking time. New things are made as others disappear.
 
The predominant colors in Riesebrodt’s paintings are earth colors. The yellow ochre, raw umber, and burnt sienna that she uses are mineral pigments, and these pigments, originally dug from the ground, have histories that tie them to specific places, like Umbria and Sienna for example. In these paintings the color doesn’t merely represent earth, it is earth. And its particular use is integral to the production of these paintings in a striking way—Riesebrodt does much of her work at her studio in Tuscany. The warm red-browns and golden yellows not only suggest, they are the surfaces of Tuscany—its clay, dust, sand and stone, the stuff of walls, pavement and roof tile.
 
 
But her colors aren’t only lyric references to nature and natural materials. Her art works also refer to industrial decay; they are the color of rust—in fact, chemically, her colors are mostly iron oxides. Riesebrodt has often gone beyond the mere pigment of rust, using large fragments of rusted steel and lengths of taut, rusty wire in her work. Even her greens are more the color of oxidizing copper than the color of vegetation, as in the painting Oxydation Pelander I, for example. In these paintings, the industrial materials and chemistry are elegiac: there is a sense of loss as even machine metals revert to elemental substance.
 
Some of her work is more explicit in its consideration of culture. Over the years, she has done a large body of work using canvas mailbags. The bags become a support—a surface—for paint. Frequently, areas of the bag are left exposed, giving us fragments of block-lettered text on worn, gray, canvas. But as useful as these bags are to support paint, we are very aware that they are no longer useful as mailbags. They are no longer containers, but surfaces. These surfaces present us with a social history, and in their original capacity as bags of letters, we take them as vehicles of communication. As with so many aspects of Riesebrodt’s work, it is not a picture of a thing, it is the thing. In this case, it is painting literally as a means of communication, albeit a damaged and possibly futile one. Is the surface of a painting like the surface of a discarded mailbag—only a surface?
 
More recently, she has used the staves of Italian wine barrels in her work. They are curved, weathered gray, heavy oak with a lingering aroma of wine. Like the mailbags, the barrel staves were containers that have become a surface. Riesebrodt hangs the staves vertically in a rhythmic series that creates a tension with the wall. We see between them and behind them. They swell gently into the room. They contain nothing, and they are on the wall but not a part of it in the way that a flat painting is. We never lose our sense of the staves as objects. While her paintings have to overcome the conventions of painted space—how we look at paintings—to assert themselves as objects, the barrel staves are objects, objects hung on a wall as painting.
 
Riesebrodt dramatically complicates the situation by painting the staves. Here, just when her work becomes most clearly an object, her painting becomes the most referential, the most engaged with a representation. In the largest of these pieces, Ambrogio’s Buon Governo, she interprets Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Siennese fresco, Effetti del Buon Governo (The Effects of Good Government). The fresco, a regular rhythm of figures and architecture, is translated as a pattern of color across the structure of the barrel staves. The smaller piece, Piero’s Legend, similarly translates the color patterns of Piero della Francesca’s fresco, Legend of the True Cross.
 
In many ways these barrel-stave artworks connect formally with the paintings. Their surfaces are layered and tactile, their colors warm and earthy. The qualities of disappearance, change, and time are also very present in these works. But they engage in a powerful conceptual twist. She has painted an image of an image, one surface translated to another surface. And ironically, the original source image is a fresco, an image done in the plaster of a wall, but translated onto the least wall-like of Reisebrodt’s formats—the barrel staves that bend away from the wall.
 
As in so much of her work, we are brought back to walls, to the recognition of painting as substance, material, physical object. But Renaissance painters thought of paintings as windows. Leon Battista Alberti wrote of his approach to painting: “First of all, on the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen.” By combining her commitment to the materiality of painting with references to illusionistic fresco painting, Riesebrodt offers the paradox of painting as window and wall, as surface and space.
 
All of Riesebrodt’s paintings touch on issues of memory. Her painting process is an analog of memory, a performance of memory. Erasures, traces, fragments, accumulations, loss, process, and history are all metaphors of memory as well as descriptive of her work. Memory—what we know and what we forget—is always a presence in her paintings, sometimes as a melancholic recognition of our forgetfulness. But memory in her artwork is also set off against substantial facts and material evidence. Her engagement with memory is part of the broader epistemological project of her work—how we know things through the material substance and the physical processes of painting.
 
© 2007 Brigitte Riesebrodt ISBN 978-0-9794284-0-1
 
Michael Markwick (2009)
Brigitte Riesebrodt (2007)
Dianne Lauble (2002)
Macyn Bolt (2001)
Ben Dallas (2000)