A school of seeing

Walter Benjamin formulated the concept that sensory perceptions, too, were conditioned by changes in historical and sociological trends.

Peter Bradtke has painted large-format canvasses based on individual frames of an 8-mm film he shot during his travels through the United States. Thus he seems to be paying tribute to Walter Benjamin’s undisputed finding, that the sensory perception in our present time bears the signature of photography. Nevertheless, Bradtke could not be as accomplished an artist, and by no means would he be as notable a representative of his trade, if he were to use the simple technique of transposing or of blow-ups adopted by some American photo realists, in other words by merely doubling the mechanical registration of reality.

In fact, Bradtke brushes film and photography the wrong way so to speak. He reverses, he aggravates the accepted, ingrained perception conditioned by photography by demanding attention where the “dissipated” and fleeting form of perception formulated by Benjamin would have been accepted and in order. Bradtke is presenting us a predetermined perception, a perception completely permeated by the sensation of thy passing moment. For the fleeting moment captured by the individual painting is presented in form of, say, a landscape captured while rushing by at considerable speed, or a view into the canyons of New York streets, or a glance scanning the facades of buildings.

Yet the viewer’s eyes cannot pass this over in a hasty, nonchalant manner. His glance attaches itself, it becomes focused on, or at least it tries to become fixed on the painting. Considering the smoothness of the surface, this is not an easy matter. Gradually the viewer succumbs, he is being sucked in by the vortex of the pictures, an unescapable force, as Bazon Brock put it in the catalogue of Peter Bradtke’s exhibition in Luebeck, in 1980.

Bradtke obfuscates the apparent objectivity inherent in film and photography. He dissolves defined contours in favor of flowing compositions of color and form. The artist applies this familiar photographic technique of blurring contours in order to suggest the effect of motion. Thus he is reaching for reality and literally grasps it in passing. The blurred and obscured foreground occurring primarily in Bradtke’s landscapes conjures in the viewer a sensation of driving by this scenery at a high speed.

The artist produces this effect by increasing contour definition in stages toward the background. This division into layers analogue to the slowing momentum combined with a clever use of color perspective indicates a frontal vantage point, a diving into the background and becoming immersed.

Applying his specific painterly technique, Bradtke provokes the photographically knowledgeable viewer of today to cast more than just a passing glance at the pictures. In a very natural manner he triggers the viewer’s spontaneous power of association. Moreover, he provokes the viewer to use his imagination in order to supplement in his mind whatever the artist left undiscernible in a masterly application of a painterly instrument. Viewed from a distance a motif may still look like a faithful rendering of, say, a newspaper headline. At a closer look, however, it may turn out to be nothing more than a blur of grey and white.

Peter Bradtke counteracts the photographically and cinematographically conditioned realism of is cityscapes even more than that of his landscapes. This becomes quite apparent if one looks at his series of 16 paintings capturing a time span of less than one second. The scenario: a delivery van passing in front of a store window and a black man taking but one step while blocked from view by the passing van. Bradtke’s sequence is composed of 16 phases of equal duration but net of equal descriptiveness. Those pictures where the city is blocked out by the passing van, the artists demonstrates in a clearly discernible form how photography can be used to make reality unreal… One must see the entire sequence in order to understand the meaning of most of the individual paintings.

More than anything else, Peter Bradtke’s landscapes and cityscapes represent an advanced school of seeing. These pictures are concerned with problems of perception and with problems of the sensory experience of reality rather than with reality itself. Their scope can be categorized somewhere between descriptive reality whose complex structure is rarely found in painterly representations, and the popular concept of creating an illusion of reality. And finally, these pictures also concern themselves with fictual aspects of the subject matter portrayed.

By Klaus Honnef