The main function of an artist is to ask the big questions. Everyone faces these questions: life, death, meaning, self-worth etc. The artist responds - sometimes using seemingly light or simplistic means; sunny landscapes, frothy tunes, rhyming poems - but even these exist only to complement, in the same way that day, for example, complements night.
Brezing chooses, or is compelled to choose, the darker route in his quest for the truth. Paintings and sculptures seem unremittingly bleak, offering us stark structures, and devices of constraint. In addition, the sculptures incorporate the innocent toys of childhood, but set into dark circumstances. It would be hard to look at Brezing's work however, and not see the same purging, self-purging, that inhabits the work of a certain seam of post 2nd world war painting and sculpture. Anselm Kiefer, has, in some ways, used the same contrasting tenderness and angularity, the same starkness, with, somewhere, just a tiny sapling of delicate hope. The realisation that the delicate, can be crushed into oblivion, underlies Brezing's imagery also, - and we are not even given the comfort of lush colors. A comparison should also be made with a contemporary Irish painter, Paddy Graham, who seeks to lay bare the soul of the painter, the picture, the self and the viewer.
If we view Thomas Brezing's work for more than the cursory glance, we may be struck by certain common practices. For example, he includes arcane verbal texts, in English and in German. These are both unsettling and reassuring. Reassuring because they hint at ways leading into the work, but unsettling, because words such as ''sensitive'' or something that could have lived, lived, lived', do not engender comfort in the viewer.
Images are equally unnerving. An ambiguous Coliseum/Twin-Towers-wreck shape dominates the large triptych. Under this, a promenade, ambiguously festooned with coloured lights, and are those, searchlights (?) contains the silhouettes of people, who seem to change in the course of their journey across the walled bridge, walking among sheep. Others carry rifles on their backs; or point them, as if to shoot, - the threatened and the threat.
In other places we can see hearts, built with swirls of glutinous, thick paint, or, stencilled leaves & tiny flowers. But it is not necessarily to these small images that we should look for hope. These paintings are like all art, mirrors to show ourselves. Look deeply for the signs buried deep within. The reward may not be some easy, or Pauline conversation and we should not expect this. But we may enrich our lives. Give these mirrors the time and the respect that is their due. Despite looking as if they have been made hastily, careful observation will reveal that they have been hard-won, over long time. Take time to feel their worth.
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