Galerie Fenna Wehlau - Christine BRUNELLA

Christine Brunella

Christine Brunella takes us along with her into nature.
Unlike in antiquity, when natural events meant divine action, more than often divine punishment, the modern human constantly thinks of himself in relation to nature. His successor, the human being of the Anthropocene, is to be signified as the polluter of natural balance and regulatory cycles that are now out of control. A loss of control that he himself is at mercy of like all other living beings. Christine Brunella offers us a different perspective: the amazement about the phenomenon, the visible appearance of nature, the coexistence of plants and animals, the admiration of the beauty that lies in natural forms of existence and in one's own echo to this perception allow us to develop a sense of resonant belonging, of witnessing communication and resonation with nature.

All her works seem to draw a reference to the present, evidently precarious moment in the history of nature and humanity, in which we, as beneficiaries of technological advances, seem to be carelessly abandoning the foundations of life by consuming natural resources. A last glimpse of ultimately lost natural beauty – which for us seems to only be discovered in museums today, artfully prepared in many layers of creative processing?

We can imagine Christine Brunella as a wanderer who – to withstand dystopia – walks through nature, or what is still left of it for us today. As an artist who connects with the forces of nature in order to defy dystopia, she creates pictoral spaces that allow the viewer to have an exhilarating encounter with the beauty and transcience of nature. Nature becomes tangible if it does not repress the moment of its own impermanence and self-inflicted frailty.

Giving this entire game a black and white setting is an artistic choice the artist assigns a strict format to her drawings. More explicitly: a clear format within which she moves freely, establishes clear rules in complete freedom and performs smart experiments with materials.

Nature can not not merely be understood as an object, it is also subject of the artist's drawings – at least as far as the draftswoman confesses to be a part of nature through her drawings, senses affiliation to nature and transposes this experience onto the page. As the viewer, in turn, tunes in and resonates with the experience of nature through the drawing sheet, a sense of connection can occur. The viewer can connect with the drawing and its creator as well as with the unity between the draftswoman and nature. Thus, the viewers, for their part, experience their own true nature and their individual relationships with human nature and their connection with the biological species around us humans – in all the harmful disunity that we have triggered in the Anthropocene and took with us along the way.