Painting it hot – András Braun
András Braun’s paintings are unmistikably his works. Wherever you are, if you spot the repetiive geometrical forms and figurative elements on a gallery wall, and the signature reds and yellows that are his stentorian hallmark, there is only one painter who could have had originated them.
The exciting decorative appeal of Braun’s paintings suggests a link with computer-generated imiges. His potentially endlessly reiterat formal sequenences with ther strangeiconic algorithms show strong affiliations with pictures that circulate in contemporary digital culture, but withouth the sterile mechanical perfection of the technologically generated image. András Braun’s paintings are the products of combined use of contemporary technologies and refined craftsman skills: he uses photocopying machines, templates, as well as knives, brushes, spays and paint rollers. One discovers different techniques and ways of painting in practically every one of his works, but ther deployment does not make him the slave of modern technology. His intense, warm palette, the lively chromatic play in his canvases (evoking organic, sensual associations), run counter tho the alienating effect of mechanical image-production. In fact, András Braun’s apparent errors and deliberate imperfections, such as dripping paint ant smudges, are the antithesis of the lifeless machine-generated image. As he puts it himself, “I take the human rather than the mechanical course.”
Contemporary pop-culture, video-clips, computers and the visual effects of giant posters all have a powerful influence on his art. Braun is like an ethnographer, collecting samples, looking for motifs in the streets, on posters, in TV-programs, scientific journals, record-covers, absolutely anywhere. Some of the motifs that feature in his paintings are first pasted onto the canvas – they may often be photocopies – and than painted over. At other times he takes something from a poster as a pattern, or takes an enlarged photograph of the motif and paints it straight. Dolce Vita for example was inspired by an advert for the eponymous perfume. This painting is organised around the magnified detail of a back-lit poster (and perfume bottle) first spotted at Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci International Airport. But blow-ups and repeated patterned structures are present in practically all of Brauns’s paintings. Enlarged details of objects, whether as cut- outs pasted on the canvas or painted, are the constant elements of his ornamental design.
Along with blow-ups and the grid-like devices, discsof concentric circles are another key motif of Braun’s painting. Of course, since the painting Targets by Kenneth Noland, the Washington absract painter, disc have become the stock-in-trade emblems of non-figurative painting: but the discs in Braun’s works have a lot more to do with the disc-like elemennts in contemporary pop culture and advertising. These Braun circles, occupying the backgraund of his paintings with vibrant colour, cause perturbingly affected visual perception and give the v viewer a feeling of being drawn into a visual vacuum or vortex. They suggest movement and depth in spite of the knowledge that the work is a two-dimensional plane. The manipulation of the ways of seeing os one of the most crucial strategies adopted by Braun in his art: “My paintings take you on. Maybe it’s an optical device. Or maybe it”s a hoax, a trick played on the mind rather than on one’s eyes… But isn’t any surface representing something in 3D a hoax, after all?”
These repetitive motives – coffe-beens, details of parfume bottles, screws, toys, coloured balls and circles – folow carefully orchestrated visual rhythms, and are always objects, or fragments of objects, never human figures. Where is the human figure, you say? “Well, ther’s the one standing in front of the picture. Seems good enough to me, “ he said in an interview. Human figures simply do not appear in any of Braun’s paintings, but the objects, often enlarged so as to be scarly recognisable, tend to be fraught with some message, some significance. Even though his paintings are spellbinding in their colour, their undoubted decorativeness, their rhythmic form offers much more than sensual pleasure pure and simple. The pictures demand interpretation. The titles cast doubt upon the meaning initially derived from the images, and through them, contextual information produces a more complex comprehension of the work. In Yugopetrol there are tomatoes clipped from can labels and arranged to form the letters V.S.O.P. against a dripped-over, disc-patterned background. The ironic pop art reference and the implied homorous comment onconsumerism in the visual language of the turn of the millennium meld with a reference to a major scandal: vast quantities of petrol were smuggled into Hungary in the mid-nineties, an affair with serious political resonances. As a follow-up to the original fraud, which had sensational media treatment, the same yankers were used to transport syntehetic alcohol from Yugoslavia to hungary, to be bottled and sold as “brandy”. Hence the use of the acronym VSOP as the central motif of the painting. Like the smuggled liquor which seemed like brandy, Braun’s paintings aren’t always what they seem. Their montage-like, multi-layered visual word and the divergent references prompt ever widening circles of interpretation, hinted at by the concentric discs in the bakground. His most recurrent techniques, patterning and masking, might even be taken as metaphors for Braun’s art. His process of painting is one of concealment and of disclosure, so the motifs and meanings of Braun works could be construed as a sophisticated game ofhide-and-seek. The significance of a detail or a fragment in one of his paintings tends to be disguised, just like the overlaid surfaces of the canvas.
Braun utilises monochrome panting, neo-geometry, op and pop art, along with multifarious images of contemporary visual culture, as a potent store of techniques and devices. His art remakes and reconfigures the paraphernalia of contemporary life to create a visual language that is both witty and comic, andis always sophisticated. His pictures have a cogency that is reinforced by his carefullypremeditated appropriations and his astonishing skill in creating a powerful, striking visual experience from it all.

Ágnes Berecz