Matthias Brandes

Volume published on the occasion of the exhibition “MATTHIAS BRANDES. WORKS FROM THE EIGHTIES TO TODAY ", edited by Valeria Tassinari, 24 March – 20 May 2018, MAGI '900 Museum, Parish church of Cento – Bologna.

A surface vibrating in the light closes the figures, like an envelope aimed at drawing the boundary between the visible and what we are not given to know.
They all have it, that vibration: objects, bodies, faces, trees, case, steamers. The hands that keep small secret chests have it. The walls have it, The door, Windows, the red roofs. The rounded cheeks, the eyelids, lips. There are sloping or bitten pears, the carefully unfolded tablecloths, the legs of the chairs. The tops of the trees and the tips of the bell towers. The prows of the ships and the smoke of the chimneys.
The subjects of Brandes' painting are a handful of recurring and repeated themes, probing traditional genres, they enter the archives of tradition, 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.

[from the text The theorem of silence. A path in painting di Matthias Brandes by Valeria Tassinari]