"They are inconsiderate toward themselves. Any brushstroke that the artist decides he does not want nevertheless remains visible; and the silvery spray on some of the images does not really kill off the color underneath, but serves only to poorly cover it over. In some places one gets the impression that we have to do less with a picture than with a painting board, as the line dividing the means of work from the product has become blurred. And where does this painting end, which with its media and formats blithely tolerates conventions and yet often extends beyond or around the edges of the canvas? Here, too, things blend: There is no separating the careless traces of work from the painting. And Brandl’s pictures have no reservations about revealing that they changed orientation during the act of painting and perhaps afterwards, too: Above and below, left and right, are in the balance, are as unpredictable as are the colors and the way they have been applied.

Some of the images have a sealed surface as hard as concrete – in others the colors lie like blunt smears one behind the other; sometimes the gaze is met by a dull mirror; elsewhere memories of ravaged earth come to mind; and then again there is a dark, clear glowing in the background, the dazzling yellow of the light on the foremost level or the swaying green graded in illusionist manner. What may read like a description of motifs in the individual works in the above enumeration hardly ever actually appears as an isolated object in an image. Instead, these various highly different ways of applying color are superimposed, contradicting one another, their texture, spatial presence, emotional tones and symbolic properties evolving in the process. Although unlike in the past the images today are not really colorful, but tend to favor one underlying tone, their microstructure is nevertheless permeated by a diversity of color stimuli. They likewise do not obey a plan, but a practice of non-intentionality."

Ex book Julian Heynen, "Niemandsland Kunst. Flucht in die Wirklichkeit" (Statement-Reihe), Verlag Lindinger+Schmid, Regensburg 2002

Julian Heynen is director of K 21 in Düsseldorf and was 2003 and 2005 commissioner of the German Pavilion at the Biennale in Venice.