Michael Biberstein (b. Solothurm, Switzerland, 1948) has taken a fairly atypical road for someone in the art field. As far as this is concerned, special relevance is given to the study in art history that he developed alongside David Sylvester at Swarthmore College, Philadelphia, and that helped him to become conscious of the pictorial problems that would later become part of his visual work’s body of research. This biographical datum will become structural for his introduction to artistic practice and for the understanding of the whole of his work through a critical revising of the European pictorial tradition, which has been kept as an operative “tool” until this day. In this tradition, his work has been, quite often, incorporated in the practice of landscape as a pictorial genre. But what is the nature of this incorporation and which landscape?

In the artist’s own words, it is “the landscape of painting and not the painting of a landscape”, which places us in the limits of the landscape of painting itself, that is to say in the context of its syntax. This inflection, although apparently minimum, is however revealing of the core of the artist’s research: the concept of landscape is a useful metaphor for the research that he has been developing throughout his more than 30 years of work because it directly implies the context of vision as well as the pictorial corollary of 200 years of European art, in the problems of format and scale that form it.

This research constituted by “landscape through landscape” marks the artist’s journey since the beginning which, because of its length and volume – and, consequently, difficulty in being put in a few words – does not excuse a more attentive reading of the bibliography published on him [see attached biography]. Some key-moments are, however, possible of being pointed out: first of all, in the late 60s, through systematic all-over-painting work, in a methodological follow-up of the proceedings derived from abstract expressionism; then, in the 70s, by making a theme out of monochrome, which is paradoxically “the starting point and arrival of the practice of painting”, and in exploring the very constitutive elements of the painting lexicon, in methodological and conceptual approaches imported from “linguistic-analytic” processes (that reveal an attentive reading of Wittgenstein) or from structuralism, in what came to be known – in the artist’s ironic phrase – as the “analytic phase”.

This semantic deconstruction of the painting language had been developed, in a parallel way, in a research on the space-dimension itself (in matters such as “wall/floor” or “painting/canvas”) of the context of its reception, and in the embodiment that its perception calls upon, which are concerns very common to the artistic practise of the time.

Thus, the problem of the relation between the painted image and the act of painting, the relation between the painting and the area and the question of the area as the key vehicle of the meaning, together with an acute conscience of the practice of painting in its historical dimension, mark Biberstein’s path since the beginning of his career and have instinctively formed his continued practice.

In the mid-80s an important inflection in his work has taken place in the light of these principles – one which, as opposing his previous work, has been called “synthetic phase” – towards the landscape of romantic tradition (although both theme and process are not similar to the latter’s), which has coincided with an increase in scale, derived from a continued practice of drawing.

An inflection towards art as landshafterei, that is, as an abstract and reflex concept of a thought that leads to a peripheral aspect of pictorial tradition: landscape as a field of possibilities to the reformulation of the spectator’s embodiment and as a rehearsal area for painting as a horizon and destination of its artistic practice.

The present one-man show, generically titled “Painting” and starting September 19th at Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, is built in the line of this work, revealing, on the other hand, a deepening of that research through the introduction of a wider and firmer chromatic range and through a greater structural density.

In this way, going back to his previous years of activity, the eight acrylic on canvas works being presented reveal painting as a field of possibilities for landscape: no longer immediately recognizable in his gestalt but as the construction of a specific kind of vision (“diffuse vision”), rearranged and converted into landscape by the methodology of a presentation – that which Robert Morris called “a kind of landscape mode”.

This rehabilitation of the problems of perception in art, and its spatial performance in the act of reception, constitutes one of the most current concerns of contemporary art. You shouldn’t, however, find strange the road that Biberstein has been leading either in Portugal (where he lives since 1979) and in the international scene, which has been granting him the inclusion in major exhibitions (for example, in Documenta IX, Kassel, in 1992).

As far as this is concerned, his nomination for the 2002 EDP Painting Award should be mentioned, as well as his soon to be released book, co-ordinated by Delfim Sardo, showing an anthology of his career focused on the central theme of landscape, and the two exhibitions that will soon be held in Switzerland (at Helmaus, Zurich and Kunsthalle; Solothurn). H.M.