FRANK BREUER >>french version


Frank Breuer is consequentially consistent. Without exception, the sky in his pictures is white, the landscapes sunk in an uncertain time period between November and March, and the architecture appears to be more like abstract surfaces than any sort of structures defining space. Breuer's photographs document industrial buildings on the edge of desolate city or highway landscapes. Like abstract fortresses, these gigantic metal structures are located in a timeless space, divulging nothing of their actual function. Distribution and production disappear here behind anonymous façades, some made of horizontal, some of vertical pre-fabricated building parts. A number of the buildings are marked by enormous signs of various companies, but the large size of the logos on the abstract surfaces do not make it easier to distinguish them, let alone understand what they represent.
Frank Breuer examines landscapes from the Ruhr area to the Netherlands, sometimes going as far as Belgium and northern France. This north European industrial space is no longer characterized by water and coal towers, but has instead become a landscape consisting of logos and trademarks. Production has been replaced by distribution; what used to be the location for heavy industry has become the commercial zone for multinational companies. Production plants are not as visible as they might have been a century ago. Towers displaying logos are only symbolic references to business, serving at the same time as advertising for an expanding consumer world. Anonymous warehouses allude to the presence of businesses, which are no longer gigantic production plants, but instead barricaded behind monotonous metal walls located at the peripheries of urban settlements.
Hermetic surfaces increasingly dominate the new works in Breuer's building series. They display fewer logos and concentrate more on the closed, reduced form and structure of the picture surface. By cropping the buildings within the frame, Breuer takes his gaze further into abstraction, so that the photographs become readable on a formal level as compositions of lines, surfaces, and fine nuances of color. This substantial sobriety allows the viewer to enjoy details such as small doors, windows, or airducts, which are tiny in proportion to the entire architectural mass. The surrounding environment of landscape and street usually creates a very fine, detailed hatching that laps at the edges of the colossal buildings; its quiet color and flat perspective also convey an abstract effect.
Frank Breuer is also consistent in continuing his series of company logo towers. Like modern sculpture, these overdimensional signs sit there in almost inappropriately banal surroundings. Highway rest stops and exits, deserted and bleak, form the backgrounds for the sculptural objects, offering what appears to be room for discovering points of reference. Although they provide photographic precision and details, the viewer discovers nothing more in them about production and marketing strategies than the pure presence of the logos themselves will convey.