Strangers in the Night
After some ten years we again encounter Peter Bradtke in Berlin. He comes to us now as an “American” or, at least, as a German living in America who has been absorbed in his new environment, the city of New York and the American film scene. He has studied closely the art of photorealism and of Edward Hopper and has developed his own type of realist painting.
This “realism” is worth a closer look. It becomes immediately apparent that it is an art, which is closely linked to American culture. The painted scenes, their themes and perspectives, their focus and un-focus are hardly imaginable without the American cinema. Yet it is not the cinema of today but that of an era we associate with nostalgic film heroes such as Humphrey Bogart in whose poses of heroic understatement the artist pictures himself time and again. He himself is the “lonely wolf, the tragic hero in all his works. Is he also the “stranger” alluded to in the title of this exhibition?
The paintings suggest a psychological interpretation: the isolation of the figure, whose face is always set prominently in the foreground against an increasingly blurred and obscured ambience, may be interpreted as a paradigm for the situation of today’s artist, for today’s human existence. All scenes are shown in artificial light. It is always night. The facial expressions, shown as larger than life “blow-ups”, are tense, expressing events, which remain untold. Eyes look into an uncertain future or are fixed on objects beyond our field of vision. In the painting “Dialogue” anything that could indicate any kind of dialogue, even the eyes, is excluded. Even the lips are tightly closed. As in a detective story one senses the drama only through accessories and through what is missing. Film tricks are used but taken out of context and left as a further source of mystery and enigma.
The detail seems to determine the image, the sense of excerption is heightened by the unusual, non-rectangular shapes of the paintings. The way Bradtke has painted some of the walls in the exhibition space further contribute to the somber mood as does the spot-like selection of the scenes which of course is rigorously and artfully composed. The musical accompaniment of the exhibition also points to the cinematographic, unrealistic and nostalgia-bound character of the paintings. There is a slight but distinct irony in the air.
At a superficial glance the paintings and their installation might easily be viewed as painted cinema and illustrated narcissism. That first impression quickly dissipates as one walks through the installation and is taken captive by the paintings, which seem both foreign and familiar. Now they reveal themselves and expose the romantic effort by the artist to find in the use of cliché a timely form of expression for a longing for warmth and depth (the very opposite of estrangement), which these paintings discreetly depict.
No “answers” are given and no questions are asked. But questions arise with the viewer because he is approached in such a familiar way. The motifs, which seem so familiar, lead to associations, even identifications, but certainly to closer observation and contemplation. Bradtke employs with great virtuosity contemporary media and techniques for his artistic visions.
He is not only concerned with images but with forms of painting which serve to create a certain mood. This reveals a classical romantic vision, to which Caspar David Friedrich already subscribed. Art historical traditions are another, perhaps not so obvious source for the art of Peter Bradtke.
His “repoussoir” figure – a self portrait – is in its function comparable to Friedrich’s figures with backs turned who define or obstruct the distance to the scene and who are’ placed next to the viewer, both in space and imagination. The scenery for Bradtke’s paintings is not provided by nature into which German romantic painters had projected their yearnings and their search for God. Instead he draws on the city, or on film sets, which, though more banal, are no less mysterious and fraught with the hopes and anxieties of 20th century beings. As with Friedrich, though in a different way, the pectoral space is entirely artificial. The unusual perspectives compress the images into the space in a way that blurs spatial relationships. In the new works such blurring is part of the actual painting process. A return of nature in jungle form is suggested but remains far from a realist expression.
By Dr. Ursula Prinz