Studying Jürgen Buhre’s Work
It may sound like a mere anachronism when Jürgen Buhre insistently calls himself a painter. Well, true in some ways. For who is among those nowadays claiming to devote themselves to the qualities of the literally artisan work despite our utmost appraised digitally networked age? Not least devoting themselves to the instantaneous impression and to the psychic presence of the artistic artefact which philosopher Walter Benjamin described, as early as in the far pre-media age, to have undergone harsh disappearance and that appears to remain phantom-like in today’s digital cosmos.
However, Buhre’s work is proof that the exciting persistence of analysing paintings remains until today. Benjamin’s pathetic term "aura" is not needed to describe what visitors grasp to be instantaneously appealing when entering the artist’s studio at the Künstlerzeche Unser Fritz in the town of Herne. Paintings that vary in formats to demand proximity or distance, approach or withdrawal; structures and surfaces changing in the light and literally calling for comprehension (which the painter explicitly encourages). Thus the encounter with the art of painting, linking itself to immediacy and dialogue, yet demanding a certain devotion. In short, a form of artistic communication that is merely feasible within the boundaries of this medium and therefore still remains unrivalled."Informal" remains to be a challenged term in recent art history, yet, it applies when contemplating Buhre’s paintings. Such as the effort to structure the surface, be it canvas or paper, to roughen or to rasp it. It is understood that they aren’t textural paintings in a narrow sense, despite the fact that the colours often show with a number of structuring layers of thin cellulose stream. Quite as often it is the colour pattern itself delivering the haptic character to the painting. Acrylic colour is the preferred medium in use, and Buhre knows how to apply it in order to allow thick and plastic faults and cracklings. Multiple layers of colour, at times varnished, at times pasty, then again levigated or applied with a dry brush, these layers emphasize the fine structure of the furrowed surface, all with its numerous elevations and indentations. Spacious and meditatively calming areas of brightly toned yellows, ochres and whites frequently join the contrasts of tempered proliferation of glaring orange red, erupting or merging with diffusedly swirling and dark colour clouds that remind us of soot or something burnt. Recent works at times develop a dramatic form, making us recollect the late William Turner when observed from a distance. Then again quiet tones attract us, again we associate enduring processes of sedimentation or decomposition, maybe here and there we associate the vague impression left by the regard of an old patchy wall. Yet, the process-like impression of the painting act, especially in recent work, often remains corporeal in the flow of liquid colour. Still Buhre’s paintings are, even if coincidence is a relevant factor, of a rather disciplined form not in the sense of an expressive and gesture-like "want", but in the sense of the reflective effort being guidance to the "right" immanent and pictorial order.
The same is relevant in other ways to the peculiar graphical tokens found in the colour depth and which are figurative allegations to things experienced and seen. Those asking the painter about their provenience will receive Buhre’s devotional and humorously subtle explanation of entirely specific stories and thoughts that lie at the heart of such titles as "Naturbursche" ("Natural Fellow"), "Feigling" ("Coward") or "Entscheidung ("Decision"). Such contexts as everyday encounters and incidents, not rarely the ancient relation between the sexes, included all registers of emotion, of affection and lust and aversion. Despite their abstract and "informal" first glance appearance, in these topics Buhre’s paintings have a narrative, almost poetic core and often show with vastly specific and individual points of reference in the daily routine.
Yet, it may not be the paintings’ expressed intention to help recalling or relating to those everyday experiences. Indeed these graphic tokens, reoccurring in Buhre’s pictorial world over a long period in ever changing constellations, form a reduced syntax to such extend that the everyday routine appears to them in a fundamentally condensed way: quite as in the case of the fascinating and minimalistic statuaries made of bent steel wire that describe human forms in a way similar to the random loops of a dropped thread, these represent reduced sign forms that suggest in a most open way that the actual visual impression be nothing but a mere "trace". Therefore comparisons to archaic cave drawings, despite the implication of the first impression, do not entirely condense to their true core. It is more likely, as it was once suggested in the case of Alberto Giacometti, that the phenomenal term "eidetic reduction" be used: The condensation of a viewed impression to the presented painting. In Buhre’s case the borderline between pictorial semantics as yet picture-like on the one side, and an impression entirely non-objective is being tackled.
Andreas Zeising