Phaenomenon
Solo show by Rebecca Brueder
Rebecca Brueder‘s works tell stories, those told by women and men who have seen the manifestation of life in the mineral universe: the stones, the vertiginous rock walls, the landslides, the volcanic eruptions, the underwater smoke , tornadoes…
They also tell other, more mysterious stories, discovered through the media, such as that of these stones which advance every night in Death Valley in the United States, that of stones transformed by the impact of a celestial body, or again that of Popigaï, in Russia, the largest diamond deposit in the world. Sometimes, the artist even dwells on the ardor of men in trying to tame, even challenge the rock, to dig or climb the surface of the planet, like the mountaineers of Everest or the speleologists of the ‘extreme.
Scientific and rational explanations do not interest Rebecca Brueder, only the extraordinary fact and the idea that these stones, these clouds, this wind, appear to be a living body. These phenomena, manifestations of a planet that breathes, rumbles, begins a movement as soon as we turn our back, or goes head-on into fury without worrying about the human presence, are given to us to see through the prism of drawing, of the installation or sculpture.
In these drawings in particular, Rebecca Brueder takes the opposite view of her subject. From the violence of a volcanic eruption or an American tornado photographed by amazed witnesses, it will only keep the gray values thanks to an always identical protocol: redraw the image point by point with a Pigma 003 pen.
It will take her more than 200 hours of work to create her largest drawings, the series of volcanoes of which she has produced the first publicized eruption on the planet every year since 2020. The same patience, the same slowness, is necessary to assemble the thousands of pieces of broken Securit glass which constitute the series of “Impactites”, these terrestrial stones whose nature has been modified by the fall of a meteorite.
Rebecca Brueder thus contrasts the fury of the elements with the slowness of artistic creation. It freezes time and the inexorable entropy of the earth’s crust into objects of contemplation whose tenacity in execution astonishes us in turn.
