DANIEL BRUSATIN’S ELENCHUS SERIES
Gstaad. August 6th, 2018
“Let us always take from nature whatever we are about to paint,
and let us always choose those things that are most beautiful and worthy”
- Leon Batista Alberti
Where does the hand of the Artist meet the forces of nature? That is the fundamental question Daniel Brusatin tackles in his joyous Elenchus series. Perhaps all artists, knowingly or not, engage with this at some level; but few have done so with such adroit beauty. Brusatin has, through these twelve abstract canvases, claimed this profound question as his own; and it may be generations before an artist could confidently declare “it is mine, also”.
What does one mean by the forces of nature? The power of gravity, nuclear, and electro-magnetism buckle and fold the fabric of reality. And as our own small, terraqueous globe falls into the sun it is sculpted by the wind and the rain and the snow and the rocks from the vacuum of space. Beyond these awesome forces, Humanity’s modest efforts to shape reality seem different; rooted first in the intellectual comprehension of the mind and followed by the premeditated action of the hand. Only through the hand does man begin to understand the reality of nature.
Whereas the clay cup reflects only the cupped hand of man, the chiseled rock reveals something else. When Neolithic Man first drove his chisel into stone it revealed a perfect, seemingly designed, line that showed what we now know to be the material’s underlying atomic structure. Jacob Bronowski saw this as a crucial intellectual leap for our ancestors. Seeing this fundamental grain of reality is what Michelangelo meant when he said his figures were already present in the marble, waiting to be revealed.
In Brusatin’s Elenchus series, we are witness to a similar leap in understanding, not through stone but paint. Myriad pigments, oils, enamels, and glosses are painstakingly composed and layered. Experimenting with humidity, acidity, viscosity, temperature, and surface tension; Brusatin incites the pigments to collapse and explode across the canvas. The breathtaking results are at once a triumph of vision but remain undeniably natural.
Brusatin has drawn inspiration from nature in the truest Albertian sense, whilst raising the undeniable question of our own place within that nature. No one piece reveals the same image to each individual. This gives the forms an unerring resonance; and in the pigments the beholder sees more organic forms than in any work whose subject is a mere natural facsimile. One sees mountains carved by rivers; flames and flesh and blood; imploding stars followed by the smallest cells cultured in a Petri-dish. A veteran holds back tears before one, reflecting: “Those were the poppies in bloom when I came home from the war.”
In the depths of discovery, Brusatin has enabled the pigments to reach new heights of clarity and vividness. The bursts of colour do not so much resemble petals but the light that passes through them. Reversing the traditional notions of paint, a new language is allowed to grow.
Brusatin’s self-evident love and mastery of colour radiates through the series. The countless hues of vibrant shades interact with one another whilst retaining their singular identity on the canvas; some merging together, others standing alone.It is a love that clearly manifests from his experience working with stained glass; another medium that transformed mankind’s understanding of reality. It is from the reactions of metals and oxides with the soda-lime-silica that glass is coloured (gold for red, silver for yellow, cobalt for blue); a natural reaction catalysed by the hand of the artist. But it was also through the purification of glass into a colourless prism that Newton first refracted, isolated, and understood the very nature of light and colour. These discussions between man and material continue to advance our species’ creativity and perception; and this series continues this ceaseless dialogue.
Radioactive or fluid, symbiotic or explosive, these dialogues occur in each work. Yet as one looks to the series holistically, conflict evolves into negotiation; each work responding to the spectral doubt raised by its neighbours, answering each resoundingly with a question of its own. Family resemblances emerge between certain individual pieces as the overall relationships resolve themselves in a unified, Hegelian synthesis. The series as a whole feeds back into itself like the great serpent Orobouros, inviting the viewer to interject or otherwise flirtatiously look and indulge in private, subconscious dialogues. It leaves the impression of having met Rorschach’s midwife in an explosion of projected beauty and doubt.
These discussions are not a historical endpoint or a full stop, but rather serve as an ellipsis in the syntax of our dialogue with nature. Beyond this, the paint seems almost in discussion with itself, irrespective of the presence of the viewer.
One finds conversations taking place between both shape and colour, with manifold wave-forms of chaos ordering themselves throughout each individual work; appearing like townsfolk clustering and colliding in the civic square; others like the conspiring whispers of shades; and still more like battalions of pigments in pitched battle. Aggressive yet calming, the regions of each work bring out a force of nature previously unseen.
These discussions even reach back to engage with the last century. Perhaps Gerhard Richter was the last to show that images and materials spring from a life of their own, with beauty and truth concealed in the materials themselves. Warhol, too, when creating his Piss Paintings, irreverently showed the autonomous reactions that can occur between artist and material; even if the point was largely drowned, so to speak, in the shock value. But for both men the germ of this idea was only glimpsed, and compared to the infinite dialogues in Brusatin’s series both seem abrupt and straightforward.
The countless interpretations that can be drawn from this series emphasise the importance of the title: Elenchus. The Socratic method of synthesising creation through discussion, the Elenctic method is expanded beyond the dialogue of rhetoric to encompass all dialogues in and between the creative mind and the natural world, perhaps revealing them to be one and the same. This ambidextrous quality, at once the left hand of the Artist and the right hand of nature, gives the series a universal quality that will forever inspire discussion, inspire Elenchus.
Find Daniel Brusatin’s complete series on his website: https://www.brusatin.co.uk/still-life