The Distances In Which We Live 

It is a truism that art is enigmatic. All distinct works lend themselves to a variety of interpretations. Yet good art works also have the capacity to impose their own view upon the spectator. The viewer's gaze is not so much returned as re-shaped. This economy of vision is not to do with recognition but with transfer. The power of such work is not that it allows the object represented to be recognised (the landscape as the artist has reproduced it) but that it surreptitiously transfers to the spectator's perception of the actual non-represented world, its own "way of seeing". It is not that we recognise the reality behind the depiction but that we start to see the non-painted world as if it were depicted by the visual regime of a particular work. Philip Braham's recent works effect this powerful translation. Distance is inverted. They do not depict distance per se. Rather; the works disclose the distances in which we live, distances which in Rosenzweig's words are "everywhere and ever".

Good art is enigmatic because, as Nietzsche well knew, what appears simple and straightforward is invariably more complex and illusive. The language of Braham's recent landscape work is haunting not because it presents the familiar in an unfamiliar way but because it re-familiarises us with a forgotten unease. It returns us to those "everywhere" distances which trouble (and perhaps even define) the North European Imagination, distances which unsettle because of their capacity to silence and to hide what is in the open. Despite the edginess of Braham's work, its language is on a certain level deeply familiar.  The watery reflections in Cold Ground and the open horizons of Moving Shadows and Silent Landscape evoke the forms and palette of Caspar David Friedrich. The blasted trees of Cold Ground and April Snow summons both the bleak romantic myths of "die and re-new" (Starb und Wird) and the solitariness of Schubert's Winterreise.  However, the haunting quality of these works betrays that Braham's intentions are far from nostalgic. Nostalgia laments the loss of imagined security, of the once familiar and trusted. It yearns to escape the very disquiet that inhabits these recent works. Braham's new works seem familiar for other reasons too. The landscape motif lends itself to the ironic sensibility of the post-modern. Are Braham's paintings the visual equivalents of Silvestrov compositions? Silvestrov's music is a response to the paradox of a contemporary composer who is both in love with and yet unable or unwilling to repeat or surpass the Mahlerian high-points of the grand romantic symphonic tradition. Compositions such as Post-ludium adopt the adagio form but become works of dis-assembly. Their tone is ironic, distant, almost one of funeral commentary. Braham's work undeniably alludes to romanticism but there is neither ironic dis-assembly or nor dissembling. Though grand in theme, theirs is not the grand style. Their dimensions are contemporary. Silent Landscape, Moving Shadows and Morning Augustow have something of the inwardly glimpsed about them, a reflective vacancy, something glanced through the window of the Paris to Moscow express.  Because of its deliberate romantic associations Braham's work, like Silvestrov's, lends itself to post-modern interpretations. Yet these images are not reducible to the post-modern. They are concerned with the phenomenological actuality of the past and its passing, not with an ironic commentary upon the past. The ability of these canvasses to evoke 'the distances in which we live' is the mark of something real, immediate and disconcertingly familiar.

Many of Braham's recent landscape images are readily identifiable. These are the lands of the North European Plain: the lakes by which Teutonic and Polish knights rode and fell: these are the trees upon which victims of the Wars of Religion were hung and these are the fields in which the remains of concentration camp victims, German infantrymen and Soviet tank crew now lie. What is troubling about these silent landscapes is that we know they formed the setting for catastrophic and cataclysmic historical events which continue to shape even the way we look at these paintings and, yet, we do not see the violence of what was unquestionably 'there'. Braham's work has the rare capacity of rendering the intimate almost crushing presence of something by emphasising its remoteness, its distance and its absence. It is not that they render the 'invisible visible' but they give the invisible an uncanny presence. There are biographical and technical reasons for this.

Some of Braham's ancestors lived in Poland until they joined the great diaspora of Northern European communities at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. For migrant communities the photograph has a powerful significance. Photographic images sometimes form the only link with long abandoned communities, tangible proof of older narratives, identities and ways of life.  In her essays, Dubravka Ugrešići documents the fate of those who have been 'ethnically cleansed'. Tyrants know that to demoralise and disorient a social group, its members must be separated from their life-history. They must be parted from their family photographs. Perhaps Braham's relatives were spared some of that violence for two of Braham's works April Snow and the drawing Frozen Path have the sense of being not depictions of a specific landscape at all but evocations of a dimly remembered image, of an old photograph being sought out in a visited landscape. The making of these paintings is an act of remembrance, a re-membering of something distant. The technical detail of Braham’s way of working generates the effects of distance and absence.

The delicate and thin brush work, the opaqueness of subject-matter and the suffused light deprive the images of specificity. Details that might identify actual locations are missing. These paintings are not so much about sites but about those suspended distances that are "everywhere and ever". This lack of individuating detail sets the spectator at a distance from what is displayed. The omission of precise detail turn's the viewer's eye back on itself. The paintings invert vistas not quite seen into vistas half-expected and half-remembered. The lack of a central object of interest, the fact that the focal point is often set just above a vacant horizon sharpens the viewer’s peripheral awareness. This has four effects. First: it lends the canvasses a certain abstract suspended quality, a quality which presents rather than re-presents a space. Comparisons between Friederich’s Monk on the Beach (1809) and Rothko are not out of place. Second: the absence of a central focal point forces the eye to wander to the sides, to the wings, of the canvasses as if expectant of an absent subject-matter about to break in. Three: the tendency of the eye to be pushed from the centre of the canvasses to their edges is encouraged by Braham’s approach to light. In April Snow, Silent Landscape, Lux XIX and Lux XX  the bright under-painting pushes the darker surface colouring forward and the eye to the sides strengthening the sense of an open central distance. Four: the combination of the eye wandering to the sides of the painting and the open centres achieves the effect of the viewer being held within the embrace of a huge surrounding horizon. Once again, the lack of visual specificity enhances a sense of edgy premonition. One hears a string tremolando of Shostakovich or Sibelius but one expects the violent.

Horizons establish the distances in which we live. The horizons which envelop us are not just visual limits. Visual limits points to the unseen but, historically, the unseen is part of our horizon. What we see is shaped by the unseen. Landscapes are formed by climate, patterns of agriculture, and traditions of ownership. Landscapes are culturally constructed so much so that the cliffs of Dover or the hills of Tuscany cannot be “seen” without them bringing to mind deep reservoirs (the presence of  voir  is poignant) of cultural association. These associations in Heidegger's mind often bind the spectator more closely to the seen image and the perception of its significance. This is, indeed, part of the phenomenological actuality of experience. We sense the presence of the unseen, its shaping power, its tremulous and troubled presence just below or at the edge of our visual horizons.  Braham’s landscape images are moments entr’acte, moments of deceptive stillness between the furore of what has been and what has yet to come. Historical consciousness is fated to be in-between. Its restlessness is animated by knowing that it has been tangibly shaped by what has receded into the past and that what will happen to it will unfold from within what is presently hidden and withheld from itself.  Moments entr’acte are praeludiums, intimations of uncertain expectation. We know the historical terrain and because we know it, we know that we will recognise what is journeying towards us from the distant horizon when it arrives. What we do not now know is what form it will take.  As historical beings we sense its presence.  Though presently withheld from us, what we have premonitions of remain present, held within our horizons and edging towards us from the ‘wings’ of these canvasses.

Braham’s canvasses are undeniable expressions of a Northern European sensibility but that does not limit them. Their ability to evoke the distances in which we live is the mark of something real, immediate and disconcertingly familiar. This ‘we’ not just European. The distances evoked are “everywhere and ever”, the distances in which all humans live. All human being is within horizons, a being which is always a being-in-between, a being held within the uncertain distances that distinguish and yet bind past and future. Braham's paintings re-member and set us down in this very human space. This is why Braham’s work is not inflected with the pessimism of Friederich. There is no loss of faith. History may illuminate and history may have to be endured but the uncertain distances between past and future articulate the “everywhere and ever” of what the world of felt human existence is. Waiting, being-in-between, having not quite forgotten nor completely re-membered, being set apart from and yet being part of an enveloping, half-understood historical process, this is the uneasy terrain of human existence. It is this terrain which Braham's landscapes re-member. For a contemporary painter to show the presence of the unseen in the seen and to touch upon the metaphysical in such a specific, located and eloquent way is remarkable, brave, and re-assuring.

Nicholas Davey,
Professor of Philosophy
University of Dundee
July 2005