(born in Graz in 1959)
Untitled, signed and dated Brandl 2005 twice on the reverse, oil on canvas, 200 x 400 cm, on metal stretcher

Provenance:
Private Collection, Brussels

His artistic activity is oriented around a preexisting image, either an industrially produced illustration, his won photograph, or based on a memory or idea. The purpose of Brandl’s painting is to make this image recognizable, not to process it, sublate it, or turn it into painting. Making it recognizable means preserving and intensifying the distance of the things and places that he needs to keep his desire for the realization of closeness alive. Brandl paints into this image; he traces it out with his colors, invests his labor in this image, loading it with masses of paint; he gives it weight and, with that weight, closeness. Only through this activity does the image become visible, but it is not something that was actually produced by the painting; it was already there before it was painted. In fact, one practical indication of this preexistence of the image is how little time Brandl needs to paint it. He needs more time to think up this image, to establish it before it is painted, and he also refers to many other paintings that precede each new one. Brandl is a painter who always paints yet another painting. Because the image comes before the painting, the painting is never finished with any image.

The closeness into which Brandl pulls the image, with the weight of his paints and the exertion of his activity, does not eliminate its distance. It anchors the distance, making the intangibility of the image tangible. But the image cannot be transformed, cannot be overcome; for its part, it makes the traces of the activity of painting the instruments of its visibility. To understand the elaborated contradiction between visuality and the physicality of the practice of painting it is necessary to consider Brandl’s dismissal of the paradigm of representation, a paradigm based on the effects of making the image visually similar to the object depicted.
Ulrich Loock
from Nähe/Ferne, catalogue: Herbert Brandl, Deichtorhalle Hamburg, 2009