Bruno Jakob: My Paintings

Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich, Switzerland

Bruno Jakob paints invisible pictures with water on paper and canvases. For the production of his pictures, he uses differently marked containers/cups with water, brushes in different sizes and strengths and his imagination. Jakob himself calls his pictures Invisible Paintings/Drawings. The artist is strictly spoken a painter without colours, because he uses pure water without pigments. During the procedure the brush is put into different containers/cups several times, it moves skilfully over the paper or canvas, draws circles, lines, points, surfaces, stops and dives into another container again. You can see figurative and abstract forms, which leave traces in the shape of waves and which change the surface of the material. The pictures partially carry absurd titles (6 Legs Confused, 1991), which open a wide association area to the viewer or they receive a more descriptive title (Evening Landscape with to Two Men, 1991), which demonstrate a concrete situation to the recipient.

The artist has also developed so-called energy pictures (Energie-Bilder). The physicist Albert Einstein once formulated the following thoughts: "Each energy corresponds to a mass, and each mass can be attributed to an energy." In the beginning of the Nineties, the artist produced a set of energy pictures entitled Green Prison nearby Bad Scuol, Switzerland. For this the artist had painted a canvas with locally well-known welfare water (Emerita -, Bonifacius and Luciuswater). With these canvases, Bruno Jakob went to wander through the forest nearby. There, the canvas was hold in the direction of a deer for one hour. According to the artist, the canvas took up the energy. Characteristic for the work of Jakob remains the equation image = blank space, which can be dissolved only with the help of the viewer’s imagination.

The painting process is the focus of the artist who at the same time leads this focus ad absurdum. His pictures are the result of the intensive examination of the process of painting and the thinking about painting with pictorial means (Meta-Malerei). His artistic development shows the turn to an art of fleetingness and immateriality. It questions the borders of visibility, the materiality and it examines the colour white in the fine arts.