ANDRÉ BUTZER

After having explored the fundamental dimensions of colour, light, proportions and the potentiality of painterly expression in the seemingly utter black of his N-Paintings, Butzer relocated to California from 2018 to 2021. Painting outdoors year-round, his latest works brim with a vibrating freshness and display his painterly mastery.

This ‘American experience’ confirmed Butzer’s belief that paintings are ‘localisations of the greatest despair and the greatest hope,’ which is exactly why ‘they come closest to the very joy and aid we are in dire need of.’ As each painting establishes a pictorial position of its own true dwelling, the titles name customs and things, places, landscapes and friendships, Butzer holds dear.

The inner location of the pictorial enables this. It creates a place within this world, yet it is not of it. ‘Its origins,’ says Butzer, ‘being blue, red, yellow and the colour of flesh.’ Everything springs from these four primary colours, carefully balancing and reverberating and brightly illuminating each other. Among the vivid chromatic interactions, the unconstraint incarnate embodies a consoling physical presence—like a bather or reclining figure. Solely by means of colour, one feels the paintings’ temperaments and how firmly each of them comes into its own stand.Loaded with real¹, every painting modestly preserves a locale for one such encounter:

Song titles, food, beverages and a deserted chain of diners in ‘Six Gallon Pie’ and ‘Steak and Ale.’ An ‘Unfrozen Memory’ of loneliness and dislocation, of happiness and soft caress. Recollections of folk music and a promised land of milk and honey in ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’. In ‘Saturday Cartoons,’ it’s kids’ delights on weekend television and one out of 21 choices of frozen yogurt. ‘Eric’s Garage’ is the place of a friend and in ‘Bibémus (Seed Bakery)’ a random store merges with art history and all of a sudden, a plain croissant or a rock face in the San Gabriel mountains resembles a golden Provençal quarry. ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ recalls both Butzer’s riotous beginnings and Guy Debord’s retreat from the Situationist International into the serenity of a secluded countryside village.² And in face of the unhindered bio-politicisation of the body³, ‘Raw Milk’ poses a question almost too simple, namely, of what to drink and how to remain in possession of one’s own health, of how to reach a self-determined stance in life accordingly.

¹ see Giorgio Agamben, What is real?, Stanford / CA: Standford University Press, 20182 retold by Giorgio Agamben, in: The Use of Bodies: Homo Sacer IV.

², Stanford / CA: Standford University Press, 2016

³ cf. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978