Claus Brunsmann/ Abstract / AR 51 / Corso / Katarakt / Film / Text / Vita / Contact

Painting, looked at from an historical point of view, may be seen as a cultural tool of memory. If it is, then the most diverse levels of this subjective consciousness that we call ‘reality’ converge in Claus Brunsmann's paintings.
They are characterised by individual layering and repeated coalescing of internal and external images – our personal universe, across which we peek into neighbouring worlds, parts of which we absorb, connect, maintain, omit or develop further in our minds. In this way, a subtle vibration of meaning occurs – corresponding to the physical properties and effects of light.

From: "Claus Brunsmann / Distorted Memories Of Nature", Kerber Publishers, Berlin

Claus Brunsmann uses oils to paint large, abstract canvases with bright colors. He refers back to a conception of history that is a legacy of German idealism, and therefor of ist Romantic aesthetic, according to wich the artist reveals interior truths, and unexpected perspective an cognitive modes, to the world. The process of ‚revelation’ is manifest in the layers of the painting, wich assumes the character of the overlapping patches and thus also of memory at the same time erased and unveiled by the appearance and disappearance of color. The nature of the self and of things becomes the principal field on wich the painting itself insists: the observer is called upon to perform the same journey indicated and practised by the artist, penetrating gradually into the color systems of the painting and beeing gradually sucked into it: first of all he is strucke by the most superficial layers, then he perceives the less evident ones, and so on, through a way of looking that must develop in time and therefore an attitude that is both contemplative and active. The artist thus intends to provide an extremely synthetic position eith regards to history, in full agreement with the premise of Romantic idealism: history as a temporal development in wich the spectator is also he who experiences it and helps to build it.

Angela Vettese / "Meisterschule", Editione Charta, Milano

Claus Brunsmanns pictures have a feeling of free material and gestural abstraction. They transmit, with great energy and a particular aesthetic elegance, subjective emotional charge as well as images full of values linked to sublimated and distorted memories of nature.

The quality of this painting emerges with greater clarity exactly when one looks at the various sequences of the pictures as a whole. In this way, one can appreciate the tonal variations, the sensibility of the apparently chaotic gestural movements, the spatial tension determined by skillful chromatic stratifications and the physical impact of the painted surfaces.