Hans Brändli
I
Color-ado Streams Ursaland
Let us set off together to the spaces of countless shades of white. To the humid places. Places of snowdrifts and hydrous skies, of montane forces and their light diffractors, of Brocken spectres and halos. As spore-sized, distant relatives of worms, we would like to recline into the Montblancs below the vast amount of white presence. Land and whiteness, place and color—this is the Color-ado, the Ursaland of the Kreatrix Ursa. She is the honey-seeker in the white terrain. Here she seeks and makes land and color, lifts the Color-ado. Ursa, you stone-lifter, continually playing with color. Handling color and gold, with color for color, Ursa skims the Color-ado streams for pictures in stones, dusts, and metals. Image over image.
II
Commons of Color
As a sapper you build and playfully create bodies, the bodies of paintings, the artificial collectives of diversity out of the unique. You inhabit and establish the cofraternities and commons of color. Corporation on shape. Shape alongside shape. Marriages. Forced marriages. Disruptions.
Havoc, too, when love affairs blend into color. Love is a battlefield. Walking and standing in mud. History painting, horses made of paint sludge. Pictures are the seat of color families. Cemented to their singular fascicules. The individual as the result of a crisis of his surroundings. Like commoner promontories, color prominences, single excellencies, bulges of hyper-convex color. Ursa, you pose the Columbus questions. Questions about color power in our world and the force and duration of a color regime.
III
Aviatrice
It looks as if you—the painting Ursa Colomba—were taking yourself to airspace-filling color bombings; to grueling, methodical overflights during your picture revelry. Turns, regulative comparisons of colors alongside colors. Color demography. Bee-fable-ish.
On to uplifting aerobatics, volte-face after volte-face at the color circle. Here is a salute to the acrobatics of color. Knife cut into color.
You seize land for painting. Wherever you open up territories and compound units of color by airdropping packets of color, you occupy them. Doing as Mother Hulda does from up there—sending down air and color. Generating slanting, colorful curtains of rain. Planting numerous U-turns. Calculating routes for loop-the-loops in and with color. Digging like the peat cutters. Terrain is pillaged. Existing arrangements of color are torn to shreds, looted, and replaced by other arrangements of color. Milestones and fences are displaced, knocked over, dissolved; color is time and again newly fixed to the valid march of the painting, to its boundary stones.
IV
Become the Color’s Inseminator
Just a couple of steps more before we reach the open hiding places of Ursa. Ursa means abduction. A principal cause of the to-and-fro into the color of the world. To the plains and crevices of paint, to its figures, the painted pictures. A being color is instantly generated, my being red, my being yellow. I indulge in the color of things, in the color of pictures. Enslaved, I am the free bearer of color, at the same time guest and host of their color streams. I am their target from wave to wave. Another time color is my pillage and I, being the elsewhere extrinsic, tie myself to it. But now the immediate importunator to their poles and axes. As an intrinsic mass I disperse to spots within it, self-reflecting. Become the color’s Inseminator.
V
Lost in the Drumlin Night
Driving down into the canyon, the colors of the world of things disappear. It is an extreme experience, to lose one’s way, intoxicated, illuminated, and to blunder into the pitch pine resin and the lake of pix. Walls of tarboard surround me. I feel the dogscapes of dread and comfort inside me. A silent squabble over the bleakness. Does a complete decoloration of the world precede the restart? The total loss that was never experienced?
The fall—an enormous rolling out to become an unwrinkled nonentity. The sea of blackness sticks the moments of absence together. Rudderless en route to a sudden loss of vision, over cataracts of the irreversible. Self-consuming visions taking off like passing, red-hot bolides. I am the pitch gap’s lump; half of me is debris, I am lost in the drumlin night, in the interior of my own cavity. Find myself abandoned in the drumlin and am separated from any binocular world, separated even from myself, have virtually become a pre-cyclops, a canopic jar in the deepest of sands whose eyes have been removed.
VI
Pons Medici
Here within the painting. There are these delicate bridges of paint. They are the finest splice of hair-width color ropes. They radiate and cruise around the interior through my vision. There they linger and perhaps await the corpuscle’s death. Or they escape it and grow into single ornaments, which sometimes generate consolation. To homofinally live on as metabolites of color. Maybe cling to the color of blood. Circulate in defense and resistance. Cultivating an internal household as flowing color metabolites. Them, the elopers of a picture, which surprisingly capture our mood; quickly alter, highlight, or whip it up. All this may spring from the shamanic power of a picture. Can painting function as the staff of staves of an Aesculapius? Does bathing in the pigment restore my somatic cells? Or does this color balm, like a precious entity, instantly dissolve into soap bubbles on our retina?
Now, here in this painting, our parietal eye takes another dose of color and enjoys it on the Pons Medici.
VII
Siren’s Song in the Marmot Hole
Ursa, a picture about pictures. Repeatedly painting anew. Paint.ing after painting after painting. How can I withstand the jewel pressure and the ground gemstones? Walking away from the sinking cloud of titanium white. Running from its dust. Approaching brooks, fontanelle smoke. To the apparition at the brightest volcano site. Brightness flows toward me, like milk and butter out of starlight. The picture. Ursa, a name for many names. White.ness and ether and breathing and picture of a she-bear of fire; streams of color like butter and milk, appealing mountain light. Color, picture of temptation, expulsion, Circe, daughter of light.