Peter Brunsmann has a divided oeuvre. He draws and paints in turn, and when he does one, he cannot do the other. In many paintings, nearly all trace of a personal stamp is absent; while in the drawings he applies as much of his own personal stamp as possible. The paintings are political-historical, cerebral and commenting, while the drawings are intimate and display fragile human figures. Both the paintings and the drawings testify to his engagement, but each in a very different visual language. Brunsmann says about this: "Both kinds of work come from the same person: I accept that different things live in me. I am tolerant with respect to the images that I evidently want to make."

About the paintings

In the seventies Europe was shaken by leftist terrorism: Brigate Rosse in Italy, the RAF in Germany. Peter Brunsmann was in Berlin and Hamburg when these cities were plastered with posters featuring black and white photographs of the wanted terrorists. He was held at gunpoint during a simple ticket inspection: safety above all else.

This episode inspired him to do a series of paintings of the most important RAF members and the way in which they met their deaths. "Behind a brown blanket / hung Gudrun Ensslin / from the window bars/ Hung by the cord of your record player". Brunsmann placed these words, spoken by someone who felt it important to mention that the blanket was brown, underneath each other on the canvas, as tightly as possible, impersonal. The underpainting is a vibrating blue and the tremors come from the fact that a palimpsest of texts appears below, letters over letters, language over language. These illegible texts are about the deeds and thoughts of Gudrun Ensslin, you could call them the typographic counterpart of her past and her identity.

Brunsmann repeats this process on other canvasses, for example one on the court case of O.J. Simpson, in which the members of the jury are introduced ('Hispanic - Man - 32 - Married - Truck Driver') in tight letters placed on an underpainting of, again, swirling illegible letters. These are translations of social events that appear mechanical, even if they are applied to the linen with sensitive craft.

It is time consuming and tedious to paint these works, admits Brunsmann. But he prefers this approach to cliché. In the painting “Black lynch victims” there are no black men hanging from trees, we are already familiar with that image, although you do see graphs with the numbers of lynch victims in relation to the variation of the price of cotton. It is in this subtle approach that Brunsmann has packaged his outrage.

About the drawings

“Pulp can possess high quality,” says Brunsmann. “High and low don’t interest me, I don’t have such hierarchical thoughts.” In his drawings, he often uses comic books as inspiration, and he call comics “a rich ocean of images and stories.” Don’t expect a detailed reproduction of the original, Brunsmann chooses one aspect of the comic that inspires him and uses it to make his own image in a highly individual style. Appropriation. He shows a comic from Robert Crumb, who drew Kafka levitating as if from anxiety. Brunsmann recognizes this directly as an interesting image, with lines he can use, with an inherent tension that can guide his hand. This “drawn appropriation” goes very quickly, intuitively, the oil pastels turn circles on the paper without the hand being raised, the image must be created in a sort of automatic script.

Brunsmann draws twice a week “from life” in order to practice his eye and further develop his personal style. His tempo is fast, he makes thirty drawings in two hours. Back in his atelier, he cuts the paper in the desired format, applies fixative and gets to work, drawing after drawing to get in to a flow. The transformation process requires optimal concentration. To give an example: there’s an image in a comic book of a drunken man in an arm chair, head drooping crookedly. Brunsmann sees directly that he can make something of it. His oil pastels conjure a Christ figure on paper, an Ecce Homo in which you can still see the original, but the lines in which the figure is now captured are unmistakably Peter Brunsmann. He calls these works: transformations (vertekeningen, in Dutch literally “mis-drawing”).

Lines

On a table in his atelier lie yellow post-it notes with short sentences. One of them says: “I also love messy, raw, angular drawings.” Complex compositions attract him more than simple ones. To put it scenically: “I prefer the Dolomites to the polder.” He needs to problematize the images he uses, and therefore Brunsmann has developed a number of distinguishing line techniques. Such as the woolly line, where he goes over the words with a light pencil so often that they become illegible and a calligraphic “cloud” emerges. Or the barbed wire line, which is achieved by drawing alternately hard and soft without lifting the hand from the paper. The effect is a tough, unwilling line.

Synthesis

Brunsmann is now working on a series of small paintings that will form a synthesis between the opposite poles of his oeuvre. Texts will again appear on these canvasses, made illegible, but borrowed from comic books. This time it isn’t the images that inspire him, but the words the comic authors place in the text balloons. The War of the Trenches
'14 – '18 by Jacques Tardi is, for example, an important source of inspiration, because this comic artist has strong political views on war. "The images and the texts in his comics say basically the same thing," says Brunsmann, while he shows Tardi’s drawings of mud, barbed wire and misery. “But I leave his images out and make sure you focus on the words.” Interpreting things in a very personal way, entirely his own, that too characterizes the work of Brunsmann.

Translated by Allison van Vlerken