Optical stimulation
Structure paintings by András Braun
Now thirty-seven years old, Andr‡s Braun created a unique, inimitable personal style in the mid-1990s. His non-figurative works, made up of geometric elements and structures and full colours almost vibrate with energy and dynamism. They demand effort from the viewer’s eye, and deliver in return an intensive optical experience. Anyone with an eye for art who has stood before any of his two metre by two metre works must surely find them hallucinogenic material, basic nervous stimulation.

The personal style is not, of course, without roots or precedents. Braun’s pictures show a clear relationship with such art-history eras and figures as the 19th century pointillists, the turn-of-
-century abstracts (Kupka, Ciurlion, Kandinsky), the early 20th century paintings of LŽger and R. Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp’s roto-religeometric painting (Mondrian), abstract expressionism (Reinhardt, Pollock), pop (Blake, Johns, Lichtenstein), minimalist serial works (Judd) and Vasarely’s op art. But despite all the links and similarities, it is the differences that are more to the point. Braun is not following any existing, established successful school. He goes his own way. His art is obviously abstract, with no place for figurative description. Geometric, because he paints concentric circles, ellipses and square grids, but the forms and structures have no symbolic significance (unlike Mondrian for example, whose horizontal and vertical lines represent feminine and masculine characters). Expressive, but the New York school stands behind his works only as art historical evidence, not as a model. An analogue with pop art may be detected in the borrowing of Lichtenstein’s painted offset dots, the spontaneous interposition of handwriting, but open cultural-critical reflection has no major place in the rhetoric of Braun’s works. The optical effects are indeed similar to Vasarely’s, but the comparison reveals that Braun is much more expressive and energetic than Vasarely, and his optical tricks do not generate soft „aha” experiences (when, for example, we realise that the body of a cube can also be seen as the inside of a box), but an intensive, whirling experience. His works can be traced back to such structure painters as Philip Taffe, Susy Rosemary or Steve di Benedetto, and his closes relative in Hungarian painting is József Bullás.

Originally from Miskolc, Braun started making montages, experimenting with overpainting photographs and brush-painting the mesh of fabrics and textiles when a student at the art secondary school in Budapest. His drawing teacher was Zsigmond Károlyi, a major figure in monochrome painting, who also became his tutor in his second year at art college. He studied in Károlyi’s „monochrome class”, the radical painting course, where András Gál was junior lecturer, and other teachers included Gábor Erdélyi, Dezső Szabó, Kata Káldi, Zsolt Fejérvári and a theoretical worker on the subject who had given up painting, Lívia Páldi. At the Academy, Braun was no longer interested in the „what” of painting, only with the „how”.
In a series depicting soups (Carp Soup, Tomato Soup with Letter pasta, Consommé with Noodles) there is still a figurative element (slices of carp), but Braun’s characteristic trait – blasphemous-ironic titling, painting of the surface of soups as structures (on the naturalistic-tone pictures, grase spots floating on the surface form a grid) – are already apparent. Giant posters, still a novelty in the early ninties, signalled the formation of a new society, and some artists (Csaba Nemes, Zsolt Veress) were drawn to this form because of its social aspects. Braun was more interested in the printing technique, the abstract-effect grid-spot surface of the enormous prints close up, or details that loose their significance when lifted out of the picture. He applied pieces from giant posters on his paintings or painted their structures.
These have sizes of 95 x 95 or 101 x 101 cm, but in pursuit of optical effects, he started in increase the size of his paintings: Duality, 1998, is 141 x 278 and Practical Sum, from the same year, 180 x 260 cm.

The works of that year testify to the maturity of his painting style. His works do not depict identifiable, objective elements, except for the occasional rope knot or letter purely structural in function. The pictures are made up of concentric circles, round surfaces, spirals, ellipses and diamond forms, arranged in a vertical-horizontal grid. These sometimes appear as bodies, with shadows and light evoking a three-dimensional illusion, and so Braun incorporates into his abstraction a device traditionally used in the illusion of perspective. The dot patterns and forms in these paintings are created out of overpainted layers. Appearing behind the dot pattern lines (or circular or elliptical lines) are the patterns from the layer painted before, or the one before that. This gives rise to a kind of visual depth, we see through the dot patterns, as if we were looking into the picture. We thus perceive apparent spaces and three-dimensional illusions in his pictures. Braun paints his pictures using a roller, brushes for painting parallel lines, stencils and masks.
Each layer of Braun’s pictures is a dot pattern, a grid, a structure. These are visibly painted on top of each other. The resulting layers work like the physical phenomenon of interfering wavepackets. Interference occurs where two or more waves meet, proceed in parallel or cross each other. Depending on their frequency and amplitude, they cancel out, diminish or reinforce each other. This shows up particularly on paintings where the previous layer has the same or similar grid pattern. The myriad of tiny repetitions set up a disturbance in the eye, and the grid starts to pulsate. After a while, it becomes impossible to tell which is the upper and which the lower layer, so that the picture’s own spatial relationships become confused. It is a similar experience to turning a kaleidoscope. The same phenomenon sets up motion in the concentric ellipses, the radial lines emanating from the centre of the picture, and the spiral forms: the viewer’s gaze seems to penetrate into the depth of the picture, or vice versa, the enormous, man-size pictures seem to come up and pour themselves over the viewer. These optical effects are familiar from dreams, drug-induced adventures and psychedelic experiences. The visual effects are reminiscent of nineteen-sixties hippie designs on record covers and posters, and even the final sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the character (and the viewer) moves deliberately through unidentifiable spaces composed of light and colour. Braun’s pictures are transmitted by the eye directly into the central nervous system, where they become confused and uncertain. The painting is thus a direct stimulation resulting in a hallucinogenic – but definitely not figurative or narrative – experience.

Braun’s paintings are produced with painstaking care often says that he deliberately builds faults into his works, but these are included to prevent them from becoming predictable, dull, or didactic. The fault is thus not in the painting technique, because Braun’s precise, controlled work produces perfect surfaces. His geometric approach has often been likened to digital imaging. This is true enough as a reference to the precision and accuracy of his work, but it should not be suggested that he uses a computer in the process. And although his pictures produce a genuine optical effect, they are not just variations on optical tricks. His painting idiom emanates dynamism and energy, the colours are full and intensive, all implying that they set up a powerful relationship with the viewer. The colours are imbued with a life of their own by the optical turbulence, and although his works share a common concept, each affords a different visual experience. Geometry and abstraction do result in dry, cold pictures to be dealt with in a few seconds of viewing. The viewer discovers expressiveness in the composition, and builds up an intensive relationship with it. This is exactly Braun’s purpose.
The first pieces of his latest cycle were shown in the acb Gallery in 2003, with the title Verso. He painted the reverse side of paintings by well-known paintings. The key work in the series is Richter, on which we see the realistic surface of the back of a canvas painting. Braun reproduces the pattern of the wooden frame, the corner stretchers, but the majority of the surface shows the structure of the canvas. In the pictures that follow, this composition is first maintained (frame, stretchers, canvas), Braun then moves away from the realistic mode and concentrates on the vertical-horizontal mesh of the canvas. The wood grain on the frame is first inflated into a different and completely abstract structure, and then disappears. The cycle includes square-mesh, undulating-line and circular variations, and the picture sizes range from 50 x 50 cm to two by two metres. Braun presented further variations in the acb exhibition HU.GO in 2004.
András Braun’s paintings are on display in the Ludwig Museum, the Hungarian Institute of Contemporary Art and the Szombathely Gallery. In 1995 he won the Ludwig Foundation Prize for Painting, and in 1999 the Magyar Aszfalt Prize for Painting. A large portfolio of his works, from all of his periods and cycles (including all the works referred to here), are included in the Irokéz Collection. Many private collections in Hungary and abroad contain his paintings.