Thomas Brezing's art is uncompromisingly honest and raw, cheeky and dark in the one breath. His is a distinctive and original voice, tautly eloquent, moulding a tough yet fragile path. There is nothing easy about this body of work, walking a sharp line, a knife-edge between life and death. It is a vision with intense difficult undertows, unafraid to probe close to the bone and open it up. Death is a continual presence, accenting in sharp relief all those joys that make life vibrant.
Brezing grew up in Germany during the high tensions of the Cold War. Central Europe was caught right in the middle between the two Superpowers' dangerous mind games, and with an older brother in the army coming home to recount vivid details of what might come to pass, his formative years were not short on fear and anxiety. This is part of his personal inheritance; caught between fear of the future and the dreadful legacy of shame all Germans bore - and many still do - for what had been done in their name. I write all this as an introduction because Brezing's work is highly autobiographical. His life as he lives it is his art. Very frequently the tiny details of his life find their way onto and into his constructed surfaces and just as frequently they are played against a historical background constantly echoing the insignia of violence and war.
Brezing is a man with big attitude and shoots straight from the hip. He is largely self taught having by-passed an academic art school training. It isn't something he regrets, 'it's just the way things went'. It is to his credit that he has turned this into a strenght by finding his own very sure and distinctive voice so quickly. There is an inevitable element of naivete in his work as a result of going this route but it is refreshing to come across when so many around are savvy and shiny and made bland by too much knowingness and art-speak. He isn't one of the 'in' crowd and somehow one suspects that he prefers it this way. The 'outsider' quality to his art befits his personality. He willingly eschews the conventions of High Art such as oil on canvas for craft materials, found objects and text, media that relate much more closely to people's everyday lives. As does contemporary music which he feels a more direct connection to than he does to other artists. The evocative and haunting, slow core sounds of bands such as Sophia, Redhouse Painters, Portishead feed into his work and the way he uses text frequently works as would words in song, like a refrain. Brezing's art can be intricate and busy but it is always accessible. He wears his heart on his sleeve, brandishes his thoughts like a slogan on a T-shirt and walks at street level.
There are artistic influences at work of course, as there need to be in any seriously committed artist and Thomas Brezing certainly is that. He has evolved into an artist while living here in Ireland over the last nine years and has benefited from looking closely and selectively at a few major players here on the Irish art scene. He could also, in time, gain by reaching closer to his old home and tasting contemporary art practice there. Germany is culturally very rich and Thomas inherits a strong tradition of art, philosophy and music. His thinking processes are already fully formed by his place of birth, his complex twists of thought redolent of Nietzsche, Rielke, Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, where light and dark wrestle together as intense bedfellows in search of an ultimate purity, an ideal.
There is a strong socio-political slant to Brezing's thinking and art. It is a genuine and heartfelt impulse, seen most clearly in 'Prisoner in your able body world'. In fact, Thomas' whole body of work stems from noticing and recognising a prisoner's wound, drawing public attention to it and then joining him in the pit to share a few racy jokes and risque confidences over a flask of Red Bull and vodka.
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