COLOGNE.- Field of View is the first solo exhibition of Eelco Brand in Cologne.
Gallery [DAM] Cologne shows for the first time the new film M.movi on three screens along with Brand's 3D constructed colour prints and his handmade pencil drawings.
An abstract molecularly looking object is floating above a hyperreal marsh landscape, a glossy blue amorphous form is lying on a meadow. The oeuvre of Eelco Brand belongs to a pictorial tradition in which landscape and genre scenes play a leading role, but goes beyond the traditional forms of this genre. Realistically looking landscapes are combined with abstract components. The landscapes seem familiar to us, evoking the impression of having seen them before - stereotypes, completely virtually constructed, but of a strong expressive power. But is not any form of visualisation of landscapes constructed, even those we see in our mind's eye when we imagine a landscape? The artworks of Eelco Brand encourages us to think about our perception of reality. Also the pencil drawings of the artist are irritating since he uses a language of forms that the viewer is immediately associating with basic 3D computer constructions.
In Brand's films the viewer is effortlessly changing perspectives: crawling like bugs, moving below and above a water surface. Branches are rustling. The slow movements as well as the endlessly repeating loop of the short films are nearly meditativeand do not meet in any respect with the expectation that we have of animated films.
The Dutch artist Eelco Brand (b. 1969) studied painting but turned to working exclusively to constructing film and images with 3D.
"Painting largely consists of adding and removing elements. You work on an image that evolves through its own logic. For me, constructing a 3-D image is the same as painting. But the fascinating thing about working with 3-D constructions is that you can enter the virtual space behind the two-dimensional surface and, more importantly, you also have the possibility of animating a scene. This means that suddenly you can go beyond the static medium of painting, and can add both movement and sound. This has created completely new ways of constructing and presenting works. The scenes I construct as prints or animations are virtual and hand-made. I don't use photographic materials or scanned images." (Eelco Brand in an interview with Wolf Lieser in Eyemazing, 2007).
Eelco Brand lives and works in Breda, The Netherlands. His work has been shown internationally in Seoul, Moscow as well as in New York and are part of public and private collections all over Europe. Field of View is the second solo show of the artist at Gallery [DAM] Berlin/Cologne.
