errare ab origine by Lutz Braun: at Main Room
“Errare ab origine” is the first solo exhibition in Mexico by the German artist Lutz Braun (Schleswig, 1976). Translated from Latin as “to go astray from the origin”, but also “to go wrong from the start”, this debut show brings together some thirty paintings in various formats which combine realist and abstract elements to form scenes in which landscapes, animals and people co-exist in a way that is both familiar and intriguing.
The artist's work possesses a temperament that is shared with the tradition, as well as the contemporaneity of Northern European art. These traits can be observed in his use of complementary and muted colors to convey a mood or build an atmosphere, as well as in the severe steadiness-of-hand on display in his drawings, in the economy of his compositions, and in the choice of motifs which he explores with a biting sense of irony and a mordant wit.
A conceptual aspect of Lutz Braun’s practice stems from his decision not to date his works, thus creating a continuous and uninterrupted flow; a body of work that suggests to wander haphazardly through the history of art, and which offers an original conception of time in painting, “as if the paintings were present all at once, or had always been there”.[1]
This correlates with another fundamental axis of his work, the notion of the journey. “It is a very common motif, particularly in German painting, as well as in German culture: to trace a path back into the depths of time and space, to set out on a quest for an origin as a source of inspiration for identifiability or individuality. This idea of an artistic journey has attracted me from an early age and has driven me to undertake more than one trip, be it a walk from Berlin to Cologne, from Leipzig to Bayreuth, on foot through the desert near Real de Catorce, or all of the Avenida de los Insurgentes in Mexico City. I have also taken many walks through Scandinavian forests in search of abandoned farmhouses, in one of which I found a newspaper from 1969, the moon landing on its front page”.
Regarding this, Braun has pointed out a development which led to an artistic and existential breaking-point: “After my endeavors –which had appeared to me to be searches for my ‘true’ self, some kind of an artistic essence, or a place of destiny– I found my quest to be deeply lonesome, anti-modern and delusional. At the same time, these experiences clarified my deep connection, attachment and solidarity with nature, ecology and humanity”.
The artist illustrates this in an anecdote which, despite having occurred in the distant past, is still significant today: “At one point, twenty years ago, a long and desperate scream emerged from a tent in the forest; inside of which a beetle had just crawled over my face and attempted to enter my ear. Beyond its wretched sense of irony, this scream marked a point after which my work shifted its focus away from romanticism and expressionism, towards historical materialism and a desire for a liberated society in which we have ‘overthrown all conditions in which man is a degraded, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being’: Karl Marx's categorical imperative”.
Lutz Braun proceeds with his work which has shifted from a search for identity to a way of wandering through the world. Somewhere between straying involuntarily from its origin and “going wrong from the start“, as a matter of conviction, Braun’s paintings trace an atemporal cartography that is profoundly engaged with a sense of the self and its prosperous or adversarial avatars that guide, to a substantial degree, the indeterminate destination-less jour“Errare ab origine” is the first solo exhibition in Mexico by the German artist Lutz Braun (Schleswig, 1976). Translated from Latin as “to go astray from the origin”, but also “to go wrong from the start”, this debut show brings together some thirty paintings in various formats which combine realist and abstract elements to form scenes in which landscapes, animals and people co-exist in a way that is both familiar and intriguing.
The artist's work possesses a temperament that is shared with the tradition, as well as the contemporaneity of Northern European art. These traits can be observed in his use of complementary and muted colors to convey a mood or build an atmosphere, as well as in the severe steadiness-of-hand on display in his drawings, in the economy of his compositions, and in the choice of motifs which he explores with a biting sense of irony and a mordant wit.
A conceptual aspect of Lutz Braun’s practice stems from his decision not to date his works, thus creating a continuous and uninterrupted flow; a body of work that suggests to wander haphazardly through the history of art, and which offers an original conception of time in painting, “as if the paintings were present all at once, or had always been there”.[1]
This correlates with another fundamental axis of his work, the notion of the journey. “It is a very common motif, particularly in German painting, as well as in German culture: to trace a path back into the depths of time and space, to set out on a quest for an origin as a source of inspiration for identifiability or individuality. This idea of an artistic journey has attracted me from an early age and has driven me to undertake more than one trip, be it a walk from Berlin to Cologne, from Leipzig to Bayreuth, on foot through the desert near Real de Catorce, or all of the Avenida de los Insurgentes in Mexico City. I have also taken many walks through Scandinavian forests in search of abandoned farmhouses, in one of which I found a newspaper from 1969, the moon landing on its front page”.
Regarding this, Braun has pointed out a development which led to an artistic and existential breaking-point: “After my endeavors –which had appeared to me to be searches for my ‘true’ self, some kind of an artistic essence, or a place of destiny– I found my quest to be deeply lonesome, anti-modern and delusional. At the same time, these experiences clarified my deep connection, attachment and solidarity with nature, ecology and humanity”.
The artist illustrates this in an anecdote which, despite having occurred in the distant past, is still significant today: “At one point, twenty years ago, a long and desperate scream emerged from a tent in the forest; inside of which a beetle had just crawled over my face and attempted to enter my ear. Beyond its wretched sense of irony, this scream marked a point after which my work shifted its focus away from romanticism and expressionism, towards historical materialism and a desire for a liberated society in which we have ‘overthrown all conditions in which man is a degraded, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being’: Karl Marx's categorical imperative”.
Lutz Braun proceeds with his work which has shifted from a search for identity to a way of wandering through the world. Somewhere between straying involuntarily from its origin and “going wrong from the start“, as a matter of conviction, Braun’s paintings trace an atemporal cartography that is profoundly engaged with a sense of the self and its prosperous or adversarial avatars that guide, to a substantial degree, the indeterminate destination-less journey of the artist and his work.
[1] From an interview with Alma Wood which appeared in “Lutz Braun. Abstrakter Realismus. Malerei 1998-2023”, Walther König Art Publishers, Cologne, 2024.
