WHITHER DOST THOU WANDER

(Journey in the Paintings of Fritz Bornstück)

In our misdirected age it seems a rare immunity to wan- der abroad without an allocated or determined sense of final destination. Yet as the figures in the current series of Fritz Bornstück paintings sojourn on arrested journey or a voyage into nature, at the same time they carry with them the material accretions of the world, the used, abused, and abject consumer objects that they might reasonably have left behind. Bornstück is a painter-sculptor who creates paintings with a highly personal sense of simultaneity between his imagined subject matter and the material application of paint. As is familiar from his unique studio practice, the latest series of paintings evoke feelings of conjured imagining and investigative uses of facture, figurative images with the mastery of painterly means and material procedures needed to accomplish them. We might see in these new paint- ings an attempt at visual synthesis between subject and object, the prescient subject a journeying figure on a quest inferring a forward projection, and objects seen often as indexical emblems of memorial nostalgia and/ or junk-shop obsolescence.

The pictorial use of layered material accumulation and juxtaposition, with anthropomorphic associations, has been part of the artist’s studio practice from the very outset, and dates from his early studies when he was an avid collector of detritus, discarded objects, and materials considered junk. Many of Bornstück’s early works took the form of painting bricolage, that is to say visually juxtaposed elements that became surreal paintings of a literary persuasion, as in ONE FOR THE BIRDS (2015), a visual pun perhaps on Géricault’s famous ‘Raft...’ and works like INSIDE GAMES ON THE OUTSIDE, or in the witty interplay on the tradition of the triptych YOU NEVER COME CLOSER (2015), where object-based figures are painted to the right and left yet the central panel has no representative image.4 But in the last decade the work has become more subtle and sophisticated, akin to visual palimpsests, paintings with accumulative collated layers of pictured temporalities (not collage) and memories of association. In speaking of the palimpsest we are evoking the philosophical aesthetic of the trace, where what appears hidden (erased) re-emerges to become a new form in the imagination and in the creative act of making.5 As once noted by Merleau-Ponty quoting Cézanne, “nature is on the inside”, and “quality, light, colour, depth which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our bodies and because the body welcomes them.”6 As a result the palimpsest and ‘trace’ intimates how materials and objects of association revive speculative imagined histories by recollected consciousness and individual memories and associations.

In the mid-size painting ON AND ON (2024) we see centrally placed the figure of the traveller, voyager or wanderer, presented with their back to the viewer as an anonymous everyman, or woman, since gender is not defined. They are metaphors for the existing process in which they are preoccupied, namely that of the journey. Carried on the back of the journeying figure is the visual world of incongruous objects, part of the familiar and extended vocabulary of material associations found in many of Bornstück’s paintings, the bowl of gobstoppers, cylinders, cardboard boxes and the like. They represent an accumulated memorial of associations that are collated and re-circulated within the discontinuous creative consciousness of the artist.8 The setting is an imagined repoussoir landscape, with the silver birch to the left and a cabanon (shed) building to the right. The composition acknowledges that if the central figure were removed the viewer is conveyed directly into the space beyond. In pictorial terms this further adds to the visual sense of travel projection, just as the pink pearlescent sky at the horizon hints at the chosen diurnal moment of transient departure. Yet it remains for all that an imagined and collated landscape, and as often in the case of Bornstück, the liana-like foliage to the right adds a speculative sense of botanical exoticism. If we look at ON AND ON alongside FOLLOWING (2024), which has two persons, we might imagine the convention of a shared passage, but yet again the figures are seen from the rear and no suggestion is made of their having entered a shared journey or enterprise. The idea of journeying or passage and encounter as we might see in Courbet’s famous painting The Meeting (1853), where figures meet along the road, is not evident, for no inferred contact or social observation is made by the artist. Again the fore- ground figure right is overladen with flea-market unrelated objects, skis, books, a bed roll, doll’s house, bottles, a crushed ring-pull drinks can, as well as the artist’s ubiquitous love of cardboard boxes. They travel into a rocky and relatively spartan valley with Mount Artesonraju at the horizon, an image known to most for its appropriation as logo of the Paramount film corporation. We see another wandering figure overladen with material accoutrements in A VALLEY BELOW (2024), yet the indicative setting is somewhat different. In this instance the deciduous trees are verdant and the nature setting is temperate, a dog appears in the lower centre foreground.

The subject of journeying may proffer an initial context, as the wanderer and/or traveller have an established artistic precedent within the tradition of early genre and/ or Romantic painting.10 Yet the subject alone does not reveal the materially and visually persuasive power at work in Bornstück’s paintings. It is rather the applied processes of their making, a unique haptic presence and overall surface facture that immediately seduces the viewer’s eye. The anti-sheen and dry matt paint surface that you see in paintings like BROKEN HOBOKEN and YOU ARE HERE (X) (2024), and in all his recent paintings, is the result of the artist’s very personal use of paint application and erasure. By working not only with brush and palette knife the paint generates a special surface texture whose effect is made in some instances by using news- paper. As the artist puts it,“what I do sometimes is use old newspapers, put them on the painting, rub the newspaper into the paint, take it off, what happens is it takes off a bit of the pigment and sucks the oil out.” This has the consequence of creating a variegated scum- bling effect, which is the partial application of one layer over another area of oil painting without totally obliterating the presence of the layer beneath. While the sur- face is still opaque it gives a sense of a hidden visible, the trace or palimpsest effect previously described.

As you get closer to a painting the marks become abstract blotches of colour, and while they may not be schematic blocks of colour as in the ‘petit sensations’ of a Cézanne, they do represent asymmetrical patches of overlapping colour use. This is seen in its most intense form in smaller paintings like LION’S SKULL (2024), where beer cans, is another amusing example of Bornstück un- dermining genre conventions such as memento mori.

What persuades the viewer most powerfully in the small and over one another. The artist never forgets that the paintings is the blocked blotches of colour bleeding into viewer is immersed first and foremost in looking at a painting as a painting. The same intense haptic texture is evident in an even smaller painting, COCACOCACOCACOLA (2024), where an anthropomorphic snail-like creature is climbing up an abandoned Coca-Cola can, the evidence of its abandonment witnessed by the indexical cigarette butt on the lower right. In fact, many of Bornstück’s smaller paintings seem to be the locus of much of the artist’s mark making and facture-based experimentation. In these many of his favourite subjects appear, his co- mic fascination with birds (often exotic such as parrots and cockatoos), and in general with flora and fauna, as in smaller paintings like PINK’S NOT RED or ALBINO ENZIAN (2024). The former sees the bird immersed in flowers, and in the latter a fragile white gentian flower is reasserting a growing nature by working its way out of the cracks in the concrete. What is indicative of the most recent paintings is the artist’s expanded use of colour, where he has moved away from a former dominant use of blues and greens often seen in his earlier paintings.

In BROKEN HOBOKEN an isolated figure is depicted under a large golf umbrella, and seen as in all instances from the back overwhelmed with calamitous objects, a bed- roll, bird’s house, an early digital clock that is without function in the journey undertaken.11 In many of his works the artist depicts and details obsolete forms of technology, reflecting the detritus and junked objects brought about by mass consumer culture and succeed- ing technologies. While the artist does not consider himself specifically a practiced draftsman, occasional drawings do exist executed in ink wash on paper; the drawing IN THE RAIN, for example, relates to BROKEN HOBO- KEN, just as ASCENDING II relates to the figurative moun- tain scene TURBULENZEN (WANDERER) (2024). But the drawn images should not be considered compositional drawings as such, and function rather as aide memoires, or at most are the outcome of an associative visual impulse.

The extended use of vivid tertiary colours in BROKEN HOBOKEN and YOU ARE HERE (X) adds a sense of artistic fantasy to the wanderer figures on their respective journeys. In YOU ARE HERE (X) the figure wears harlequin trousers, perhaps an oblique reference to Picasso, and the original character from commedia dell’arte, where he is often seen as a nimble trickster. The artist sometimes plays with the tropical and exotic, gentian flowers appear growing and interwoven in the backpack of the wander- er figure in YOU ARE HERE (X), whereas in other examples banana plants, and acacia, are set as staged fictional pictorial settings, such as in the painting C IS FOR COUGAR (2024), alongside the bowl of gobstoppers, smashed television set, oil drum and abandoned metal containers. The artist described his approach to the wanderer and voyagers in this series in terms of “painting as an expe- dition, discovering wild painting which is what I am trying to achieve—not sketching—stumbling into things, touching it while it appears, trying to get hold of it then formulating it from memory so that it stays in this space.” The artist has of course travelled (journeyed) extensively over recent year and many of his motifs are drawn from lived experience, an accumulation of visual sites, sublimated to appear at later date by the evocations of involuntary memory.

In relation to the modelling of ceramic sculpture there is a continuum of interrelated works between his paintings and sculptures. But there appears a specific importance given to humour and the comic which, though evident in his paintings, is more pronounced in the artist’s working within the three dimensions of sculpture. In the sculpture BRIAN (2024) a mouse sits on top of a ceramic (cast) oil drum while smoking a cigarette, in another example, CASSANDRA (MAGENTA BARREL) (2024), a small Minerva owl looks querulously towards the viewer.13 As a result two material questions emerge, the first as to the artist’s investigative interest in the collocation of the natural and the synthetic source material as subject matter, the organic and the artificial, and equally his use of non-relational scale as seen in the sculptures. It is a feature of Bornstück’s sculpture, and also his paintings that he frequently plays with an elasticity of figures’ and objects’ scale and juxtaposition. In the sculptures HÜTCHEN (2024), a simple utilitarian plastic traffic cone has been modelled and cast into a glazed ceramic edition, a commonplace and ubiquitous object of the every- day you might kick over in the street has been trans- posed and given the elevated artistic status of sculpture. This said, for the most part the sculptures are closely related to any number of paintings, the same cigarette smoking mouse appears in a small painting sitting atop an old amplifier in BATTERY RAVE (2024), or in another example two mice are sitting in front of a fire warming themselves in LA ISLA BONITA (The Beautiful Island, 2024), a witty side reference no doubt to Madonna’s famous song of the mid-1980s.14 The small ceramic PLANTASIA (STEINBRECH BLAU) (Plantasia (Blue Saxifrage), 2024) sculp- ture series is obviously visually relatable to paintings like ALBINO ENZIAN where the fragile flower asserts itself against the synthetic concrete surface. It continues as a resonant theme in Fritz Bornstück’s sense of painterly endeavour, the mediated reassertion of nature and the natural world, a pictorial vision hidden under the mask or guise of imagined landscapes and staged sometimes theatrical-fanciful settings. The objects and ‘things’ of the world are the material accumulations we carry and randomly discard, since the wanderer lives with an uncertain outcome, as the poet affirms, “In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood, where the straight way was lost.”

Mark Gisbourne

21 October 2024