Vittorio Brodmann

Vittorio Brodmann’s work holds the tension of its own creation. Color and line and form and the figurative react against our notions of foreground and background, our expectations of how an image is built. His paintings and drawings often suggest total compositions formed through the artist’s reactions against early intuitive, unplanned markings. Yet, the dynamism of these works hinges on a layering within his enigmatic scenes, powering chicken and egg questions about their creation. In these two drawings, almost every mark of ink and pencil, each stroke of watercolor, is believable as both the final and first on the sheet. This imbues the works with a constant sense of activity that translates over to the way the figurative images are read. Everything emerges naturally, concurrently to the feeling of being decidedly placed. Unsettled oppositions that end up working together in harmony. These tight, polished compositions play with many languages, such as sketching in a notebook, planning for a painting, storyboarding for a film, or frames in a comic. As stationary scenes they provide little concrete narrative but suggest a range of feeling and activity, lively because of the delicate and complex way the total work is built up. Brodmann’s surreality is based more in life than in dream, and the wholeness of these works speaks to the ways in which we move through the world, considering it while we compose ourselves in the face of it.

– Mitchell Anderson