An excess of meaning in Lutz Braun’s work can be as devastating as a lack of it. His artistic approach, combining painting, drawing and other techniques on different surfaces and materials, blends figurative and abstract elements in dream-like or nightmarish arrangements, with more or less familiarity.

Housed at Lisbon’s Jahn und Jahn gallery, the exhibition Flaming Loneliness bears witness to this style of work, based on exploring a kind of abstract realism^[1]. Using his experimental practice, the German artist develops a visual poetry consisting of collapse and hope at the same time. Among colourful landscapes and smouldering ruins, there is a latent ambiguity preventing any definite interpretations. One gets the feeling that each work contains – or could possibly contain – echoes of some other, like traces of a narrative that has been repeatedly interrupted or rewritten. This deconstruction does not seem casual, but rather a mechanism by which Braun reflects on the contemporary world, its inherent volatility and his own dilemmas. The social and political aspect of the artist’s work is familiar, but always presents itself as a discreet presence. Braun does not idealise crises, but embodies the tension of the world in his own language.

A mysterious fascination rings through the contours and elements of Braun’s unique narrative sense. It involves shedding new layers of stories that permeate each other without ever being entirely sealed off; they beg for our active engagement in trying to decipher meanings. Each work could be a breach in an unexplored universe capable of absorbing us. A short story, a narrative frame that flows far beyond our presence, where the pursuit of a more solid understanding, of a conclusion, can consume us. The short story The Zahir by Jorge Luís Borges comes to mind, where a coin turns into a dead-end maze. When seen, the object becomes unforgettable and the obsession with its comprehension develops until the observer’s consciousness is consumed, leading to the loss of their own identity. In the same way, Braun’s works engulf and drag us into elusive narratives where, by trying to over-attribute meaning, we are in danger of losing ourselves in ever-changing, slippery and tricky places. In his work, I perceive the same haunting found in The Zahir, an abyss of fictional realities, a rift that consumes those who attempt to wrap anything up.

We see a dialectic being explored throughout the rooms between destruction and renewal. Landscapes, sketched skulls and figures laden with a sort of inescapable melancholy dwell in his works, at once sombre and captivating, as if, in the face of inevitability, there is always a hoped-for transformation. Braun appears to bring pure fatality with him so that he can escape it, and his work contains a simmering resistance and life force, whether through the representation of figures holding a glass of wine in a cave (Archäologie), a nursing cat (Dirección Navional de Migraciones Buenos Aires 2009) or through his use of bright, vibrant colours, which, even in the ashes, are always a promise of something new – but we shall come to colour in a moment.

The artworks in the gallery do not necessarily have to be seen as a cohesive whole, but rather as a fragmented universe that melts into a restless, vibrating atmosphere. Each work is a lonely imaginative field, a mirage of past or future events, whose excessive importance could be eroded; on the other hand, to ignore their evocative power would be to make them empty.

Braun introduces an elliptical timeline into his work, where what was and what will never be coincide on the same surface. He eschews the idea of a closed discourse; on the contrary, he defies us to experience the gap, the unspoken, the hypothesis. He strives to remove the concept of time from his work and that is why he prefers not to date his works, in a bid perhaps to detach them from the cultural ties that put them in a specific period, or perhaps to prevent us from packing them up like a jigsaw puzzle and assembling the story – of him and the several worlds within him -, allowing them to exist on their own, dangling in an indefinite time, or in several periods simultaneously.

Colour is central to this quasi-delirium effect, oscillating between bright, vibrant tones and monochrome outlines and strokes. The colour choices not only define atmospheres, but magnify the emotional charge of the works. In Braun’s artistic production, they are not mere aesthetic artifice; colour imposes itself as its own language, a way of translating states of mind, perceptions and feelings.

This is possibly the greatest asset of Flaming Loneliness: an exhibition that murmurs the secrets of memories and places using colour, that plays with fire so that we can, for now, escape a definitive end.

The exhibition is open at the Jahn und Jahn gallery until 8 March.

^[1] An idea explored by the artist in his conversation with Alma Wood in July 2023, featured in the catalogue Lutz Braun, Abstrakter Realismus, Malerei 1998-2023