Michael BIBERSTEIN (1948)

Michael Biberstein, born in Switzerland in 1948, has lived and worked in Portugal for almost two decades. He has mainly researched landscape as a theme and his internationally renowned work, has revolved around the rehabilitation of art’s metaphysical character, returning purity and sharpness to the observer’s gaze by methodically questioning the validity of painting and of the concepts of beauty and the sublime.

After studying Art History with David Sylvester and dedicating himself to his first pictorial landscape attempts in the early 70s, Biberstein became interested in artistic structure and mechanisms and developed an analytical process that lasted into the following decade. By deconstructing the different elements of a painting (for example, layers of paint were shown in three dimensions, represented by large surfaces of thin gauze), Biberstein explored its constituent elements, its nature as an object and its spatial dimension, explicitly exposing them to the observer’s perceptive conscience in a procedure influenced in part by the Support-Surface group.

More than a mere exercise in style, Biberstein’s work represents a search for the intrinsic and discursive viability of a language riddled with iconoclasm. The self-awareness Biberstein imposes both on his painting and on himself as a painter result in an awareness of painting as an activity that can still produce meaning and interact with the lived reality of the individual through experience.

If it is true that the artist found a layer of memory in tradition that his works invoke and consubstantiate, so is the fact that his paintings evince a refined and contemporary perceptual proposition. In fact, his large landscape paintings– where, at times, the presence of a typically northern European sensibility and the influence of traditional Chinese painting are discernable– are defined by a conceptual framework that is clearly marked by the teachings of north American minimalism, and are often accompanied by devices that refer to the projects of Land Art artists in determining the observer’s physical positioning. In this sense, Biberstein’s painting is to be seen with the entire body, and apprehended as a metaphor for the globalising and ineffable experience of a transcendental reality: i.e., nature.

Herein lays the paradox of Biberstein’s painting, which, after all, is the paradox of landscape painting directed by the sublime. Although Biberstein considers paintings to be physical objects, finite in their concrete existence, they are also vehicles for the figuration of the feeling of unspeakable awe that overcomes the observer whilst confronted by a certain physical reality– such as mountain ranges and peaks, or the infinite sea– that outdoes his rational understanding and situates its perception in the realm of the invisible.

NUNO FARIA