Andy Denzler

▲The Way to the River, 2012, oil on canvas, 150 x 150 cm

▲No Mans Land lll, 2010, oil on canvas, 150 x 200 cm

덴즐러의 작품은 꾸밈이 없어, 약간은 거칠고 단조롭게 느껴지기도 하지만, 작품 안에 포함되어 있는 모든 요소는 각각의 맡은 역할을 실행하고 있다. 수평으로 흐릿하게 왜곡된 이미지, 수직으로 두꺼운 재료를 이용한 추상부분, 붉은 계열과 무채색의 조합이 만들어내는 그림 이야기가 있다. 기억과 관찰이라는 개념들을 가지고 노는 것은 물론, 차용(가져다 씀)과 작가 특유의 회화적 테크닉을 조합해서, 지각의 확신에 대해 의문(지각한 것이 틀림없는지)을 제기한다.

▲Watchdog, 2011, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm (2parts)

/ THE HUMAN NATURE PROJECT
Nadine Brüggebors
No Man’s Land. True Faith. Berlin 1968. The Hunted Garden. The titles that Andy Denzler gives his paintings might also have been taken from films, poems, or pieces of music that resonate softly when the images are viewed. Beyond the visual experience, the paintings open up further fields of association without specifying strict terms of reference. Denzler’s painterly oeuvre, which is conceptually structured in series, encompasses subjects of relevance both personally as well as to society. Thus, his body of work ranges from those that are politically motivated such as the American Paintings (2005), a critical examination of the Bush government, to the poetic transposition of beach studies, entitled A Day at the Shore (2006). In the portrait-like paintings of the Insomnia series (2007), Denzler visualizes the psychological and physical effects of a society that applauds continuous activity and a constant willingness to perform. In parallel to these works, which are created for individual exhibitions, Denzler also creates portraits on an ongoing basis. These depict celebrities such as Kurt Cobain and Barack Obama, but also friends of the artist or images of unknown individuals found on the Internet or in the press. As a result of the artist’s smudging technique, the portraits are also reminiscent of film stills and video images that have been halted for a fraction of a second. The Human Nature Project (2010) can be seen as a consistent continuation and broadening of the content of his work up to this point. The series expands on the central question of human nature and how it is positioned in society and the environment, a theme that Denzler has continued to explore in new ways since turning from abstract to figurative painting. The Human Nature Project questions the relationship between the human figure and nature within the tension that exists between the artistic poles of figuration and abstraction, color and mono chrome, perception and imagination. The title of the series of paintings can thus be interpreted in a twofold manner: on the one hand, as an investigation of the relationship between humans and nature and on the other hand as an examination of the essential nature of humankind itself. This ambivalence is intrinsic to the images: the figures are allotted much more space in the landscape than if they were simply staffage, but as the paintings rarely exhibit individual, portrait-like characteristics, it is instead the landscape that evokes atmosphere and emotion.
In the painting Waterfall Crossing (2012), the female figure already takes in a constitutive role as a result of her central position in the composition. Striding to the left, she holds her head lowered. The direction of her gaze might be presumed from the title: the white area that takes on a darker tinge toward the left hints at a waterfall whose cascading masses of water are supplemented by the viewer’s imagination. Standing in the middle of the composition, the figure divides the image into light and dark sections, into landscape elements denoting tranquility and those that evoke motion. The female figure is not a natural part of the landscape but instead seems to be uprooted and does not belong to the place. We learn neither more precise details about the topography or temporal framework nor about what has brought the figure to this place. She stands on the border between two worlds, undecided about whether and in which direction she will go. The question of what decisions she will make remains open. The images in the Human Nature Project do not strive to communicate any certainties but rather raise questions about the fundamental relationship of humankind to the landscape. What significance does the natural landscape have for human nature? What impact does the landscape have on humankind and how does humankind find its place in the landscape? How does humankind relate to nature? Questions such
as these are not forced by the paintings but posed subtly and only become manifest upon close reading. Nonetheless, it is the beauty of nature and its aesthetic effect that are in the foreground of the motifs and not the interventions in nature undertaken by humankind, with all their consequences, as they are constantly presented to us in the media.
Working in series offers Andy Denzler the possibility to address these existential questions in new ways again and again. The basis for his works comprises his own photographs as well as images found in the press, in films, and on the Internet and then processed digitally. It is occasionally possible to recognize concrete source materials, for instance images borrowed from Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts (1993), or reminiscences from art history. This subjective utilization of motifs from the history of art, film, and images should not be understood as an attempt at modifications of canonical role models. Through the selection of detail, the alienation of perspective, and free painterly realization, Denzler conceptualizes his
own world of images. In doing so, the artist is not so much a narrator who prescribes a structured story with a beginning and an end, but rather that the images search for viewers who bring their own experiences and cultural and psychological imprinting, and thus shape the images into a new, individually devised story. In this sense, Denzler’s multilayered work is to be understood as a reflection on classical concepts of genre and techniques of art and media history. The artist tales advantage of these concepts and techniques and imultaneously questions them through testing established borders, for example through the use of modern image processing techniques in the medium of oil painting, a form understood entirely as a manual technique.
Denzler’s painting technique, which he has developed and refined over years, is closely connected with the phenomena of motion, time, and perception. When reading the image, the viewer comprehends the work process layer by layer: the step-by-step application, the smoothing, spreading, and smudging of paint. The eye wanders over smooth sections of smudged oil paint, lingers at points where underlying layers are exposed, and penetrates the surface to the deeper layers of paint. The colors are first applied brushstroke by brushstroke and then drawn with a squeegee, in most cases horizontally, across the entire breadth of the canvas. By means of this final dispersion, the paint masses are combined into intermediate shades, and areas that define the subjects of the image are created. This method presupposes the artist’s ability to anticipate the result during the act of underpainting. The entire surface of the image, however, is not smudged: bands that structure the image formally and lead the attention of the viewer to what is “underneath” often remain. The work process itself is a race against time as a result of the wet-on-wet
technique described and requires rapid action on response to the drying process. The painting thus also aims to visualize the act of becoming and to serve as an image in which it remains possible to experience the artistic process of creation. With his paintings’ blurred contours, Denzler addresses the question of perception. Without being able to acquire certainty about the appearance of the subjects of the image, the viewer’s eye sharpens the outlines and shapes the areas individually into familiar forms. The existence of the objects of the image is the result of subjective comprehension. The technique and content of the image supplement each other as they aim at the same pictorial statement. The fact that the backgrounds cannot, for the most part, be defined, that it is not clear which landscapes,
which trees, or which lakes are involved, results from the high degree of abstraction. In the painting The Orange Hues of Heaven (2010), three geometric surfaces that are nuanced only in color and whose finished surfaces can hardly be distinguished from one another define the planes of earth, water, and heaven. A thin line indicates the horizon. An effect of depth arises above all from the presence of two archaic-seeming figures in the image. What is addressed here is not so much the relationship between figure and nature, but rather how the landscape serves as a setting for human interaction whose content Is not clearly evealed to the viewer. The shadows that are cast in The Orange Hues of Heaven, pointing to a light source outside of the image, are striking. The reddish-beige hue conveys a warm tmosphere
and invokes the earth of South Africa, where Denzler lived for one year in his youth. This earthy tonality characterizes many of his works of the 1990s, and the high degree of abstraction of the landscape calls to mind Denzler’s early work in which he intensively explored the painting of the Abstract Expressionists and the Zurich Concretists in order to examine the balanced distribution of areas, the phenomenon of the golden ratio, and the relationship between color and form. In the series Urban Figures (2009), Denzler Takes up abstract compositions anew and transforms them into a stage for his figures, which are mostly portrayed from the back.
The Human Nature Project series includes a sequence of monochrome works reminiscent of grisaille, the painting form whose gray “chromaticity” is achieved exclusively by tonal gradations of black and white.
On closer examination, it becomes clear, however, that Denzler’s works are in no way black-and-white paintings. His shades of gray build on individual chromatic undertones such as sepia, eggplant, and olive, or contain numerous additional shades of color ranging from brown to orange to blue. An elegant monochrome, the sepia hue in which the painting No Man’s Land I (2009) is immersed call to mind old photographs yellowed slightly by sunlight. The painting could be a lighthearted childhood memory of days in nature: the lakeside as destination for summer excursions, climbing in the trees on the shore, diving in and enjoying hours in water that is never too cold, losing oneself in play: moments when one is at one with oneself, with time, and with space. No Man’s Land: is it a land that belongs to no one
because it is fictitious, past, or a dreamscape? Denzler’s images also call to mind film stills, sequences that seem to have been taken from a larger narrative connection. The moving images in a film are created through the rapid succession of static single images. As a result of the sluggishness of the eye, these are not seen separately but perceived instead as filmic motion. Because of his technique, in some of his particularly impressionistic images, Denzler succeeds in evoking movements in nature such as the wind rushing, water flowing or the light of the sun glistening on the seashore. For example, in the painting Floating Stones (2010), a viewer may perceive water Flowing around stones, or, as in Across the Shallow Stream (2010), the wind literally caressing a female figure. Like in Floating Stones, the heads of the mostly isolated figures are positioned on the horizon line, which aids spatial orientation and can simultaneously be interpreted as a motif of yearning and of freedom. Denzler’s landscapes are thus spaces of projection: they prompt viewers to call up their own moods and memories and to question them. Depending on the choice of colors and subject,
they can trigger exhilaration and confidence, but they can also unsettle and weigh the viewer down with their indefinite openness to interpretation.
With his Mythenquai works created in 2010, the artist designs modern images of history that avail themselves of the traditional vocabulary of heroic landscapes. The title of the painting refers to the lakeshore promenade in Zurich of the same name. Denzler thereby gives the viewer reason to expect the depiction of an urban landscape and at the same time elicits thoughts of ancient myths, of its heroes and their yearning for distant places. Although compositional schemes or individual figures might call to mind traditional pictorial formulas, these paintings cannot, nonetheless, be decoded unambiguously. Denzler does not narrate predefined stories nor present any concrete events. He instead offers snapshots in time
of a possible narrative. It is not images that have been hand down that serve as his source material, but rather self-stages photographs: Denzler visited the location with actors who posed according to the artist’s instructions. The artist thus acts as director and as a creator of new myths. The title Mythenquai I (death of Actaeon) alludes to an episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which the hunter Actaeon observes the Goddess Diana while she is bathing, is transformed by her into a stag for this offence, and is subsequently killed by his hounds. In its dramatic pictorial sensibility and painterly treatment, Denzler’s painting might be compared to Titian’s Death of Actaeon: both artists model the subjects of their images not based on contour but on the paint, Titian classically with the brush, Denzler through smudging with the squeegee. The broken coloring in Denzler’s rendering is reminiscent of the Venetian master as well. Differences become clear above all in the handling of the literary source material: while Titian conclusively interprets Actaeon’s fate, Denzler’s painting formulates conundrums that do not allow the action depicted and the literary convention referred to in the title to be reconciled unambiguously. Denzler’s recourse to Ovid’s poem and Titian’s painting seem to be important insofar as he takes up the ideas of transformation and relates it to how such traditions are handled in general. The other images in the series also raise questions. What story might be taking place in the painting Mythenquai II ? Like in depictions of the Deposition of Christ, a male figure with a bowed head lies in the supporting arms of a second man. Before a gray sky, the two standing figures gaze in opposite  directions: are they questioning, waiting for help, or existential themes such as the search for meaning, solitude, forlornness, and paralysis. The painting Mythenquai III evokes similar thoughts but also elicits images and memories of the young rebels of the young rebels of the American cinema of the 1950s: Marlon Brando and James Dean, for instance, and the lack of direction of a misunderstood youth. In Denzler’s paintings, what is expressed is an entirely personal perspective on topics that concern the individual as well as society. The images serve as open offers to viewers to pause and appreciate the pictorial world with a slower gaze in order to examine themselves and question their own positions. Denzler’s paintings are sensitive descriptions of fragile states. They do not remain on the surface but rather penetrate the physiognomy of the landscape, the depths of society, and the inner psychological state of humankind, and in doing so, turn what is innermost inside out in a fragmented and vulnerable manner. And yet a touching and hopeful lightness frequently inheres to Denzler’s images despite all the existential themes and the not infrequent serious undertones, as the viewer is made aware that they are also an expression of a reality that finds itself in constant flux.

Andy Denzler
1965 Born in Zurich/ Switzerland
1981 Kunstgewerbeschule, Zurich/ Switzerland
1998 Member of visarte.bvk
1999 F&F Schule fur Gestaltung, Zurich/ Switzerland
University of California, Los Angeles/ USA
2000 Art Center of Design, Pasadena/ USA
2006 Master of Fine Arts, Chelsea College of Art and Design, London/ UK
Lives and works in Zurich/ Switzerland