The Post-Concrete Way

Pierre Schwarzenbach’s work shares, with concrete art, a dedication to non-figurative art and restriction to non-referential basic visual features like lines, rectangles, and circles. His expressions of emotion, however, set his work apart from other Zurich-based concrete artists. For Schwarzenbach, the materialization of emotions is more important to him than calculation, regulation or perfection. Sensuality and feeling, as mediated by the pictorial surface, is a central concern for him; his compositions are free of dogmatics. If his pictures were music, one would sense delicate, harmonic dissonances. He alters his compositions, meticulously and without peace, until the interplay of weight and counterweight dissolves ordinances from above and below. In his painting, leanings may be noticed towards abstract expressionism with its spatial depth, though it skirts a traditional art-historical classification.

The artist’s generic term "post-concrete" is striking and apt, insofar as it carves a path from the known to the unknown, flourishing in possibility. In its complexity, Schwarzenbach’s work is counterpoint to mid-20th century informal painting. Just as other Zurich concrete artists – especially Richard Paul Lohse – worked from a socio-political postulate, Pierre Schwarzenbach, too, has social concerns: "I would like to oppose the increasingly shrill, louder and more brutal impulses of the digital age. With each picture, I invite onlookers to quiet contemplation. View in this light, my post-concrete painting is a meditative painting, a kind of poetic constructivism."

Raised in a family with a dynastic heritage in the silk industry, the young Pierre Schwarzenbach developed a great sensitivity to materials, a sensitivity he honed in the department of textile design at Niederrhein's University of Applied Sciences in Krefeld. This sensitivity, first marshalled in the service of silk companies like Abraham and later Hermes Paris, was then transposed to his art. The bright shades he had once played out on the haute couture catwalks lost their glamour in his artwork, though they gained a new complexity and depth in execution.

In the graphic workshop of the Zurich artist Klaus Däniker (1930-2009), Pierre Schwarzenbach learned the techniques of fine art from scratch. His mentor introduced him to the full breadth of graphic techniques and encouraged him to experiment with new materials. Thanks early on to Däniker’s instruction, Schwarzenbach remains knowledgeable about contemporary painting media and techniques. Always in search of a deeper surface, Pierre Schwarzenbach often works with sand, wax, graphite, lacquer, and rare pigments. The gold leaf he uses in certain pictures is applied on a spatula coat, handled in such a way that its radiance is amplified without seductive sweetness. He frequently employs old masters oil painting effects with acrylics, layering many colours, applied pointillistically, so that base tones come to reflect light on the surface, producing effects of the highest subtlety. In this technique, blacks and whites remain the primary contrasts, as they do in printmaking, while shades of colour, in their scarcity, shine all the more strongly.

The artist's ways of post-concrete art sometimes lead to monochrome images, yet another break with tradition. It is not the gesture of brushwork that distinguishes them but rather a sensitivity and modesty in structure, creating a near-haptic attraction for the viewer. The philosopher Edmund Husser spoke of the phenomenology silk and its unique splendour, positing that although its splendour is visually present, its unique smoothness cannot be seen but only be felt – or perhaps imagined from the way it reflects light – something Schwarzenbach masterfully addresses in his work. This attempt at tactile perception in a visual medium plays a fascinating role, approaching synesthesia. Zurich concrete art is quite different: in it, the serial sequence of works is quite characteristic of a rigid system. As a former textile designer, the artist is familiar with this kind of repetition, but he is opposed, however to categorizations of artistic "branding" by such a system. Every image, for Schwarzenbach, is its own new adventure. Within this exhibition, it might be said, the only constant is his handwriting.

Yves Schumacher, Zurich
April, 2917