"L´Escargot"

The works of Arik Brauer are chiefly characterised by the intense, soft and nuanced colours and the detailed precision work which together create a dream-like atmosphere. Influences that can be discerned include that of Pieter Bruegel the Elder as well as oriental miniature and icon painting. Arik Brauer once described his pictures as brightlycoloured stones in the bed of a stream that can be picked up and examined:
‘Your imagination begins to turn like a mill in the wind and many kinds of thoughts awaken. My pictures are elastic in all directions and have to be thought through and reseen by viewers each time afresh.’1
The present painting gives the impression of never having been clearly and definitively seen through to the end, so multi-layered is Brauer’s fantastical landscape that we encounter here. On a ground of the most varied red and orange tones, mythical creatures and figures romp, and several scattered houses, too, which in their architecture makes us think a little of the playful forms and colours of Hundertwasser, a close friend of Brauer’s. Various elements stand out sharply in terms of colour from this fairytale-like, complex background. In the right-hand half there is an enormous, gloomy and threatening-looking creature, resembling a snail, at the end of which flames flicker, it seems. To the right of it, a poisonous green plant shape stands out sharply from the background. The left half of the picture is dominated by a branched tree in which a yellow-green, woolly nest seems to rest. This is inhabited by a huddled, bird-like light figure. To the left, under the tree, a huge, fabled insect can be seen in luminously bright colours. In sharp contrast to the events below is the dark blue night sky, interrupted only by a jellyfish-like cloud to the left and a shimmeringly green insect to the right. One would need to explore the context in which all these figures, seemingly existing independently of one another in Brauer‘s pictorial cosmos, nevertheless make sense together.
1 Wieland Schmied, Arik Brauer. Monographie mit Werkkatalog, Vienna, Munich 1972