CARL VON BÜREN
Comune di Melano
October 2, November 20, 2015
AN ARTIST FROM MELANO FOR THE NEW TOWN HALL
The story behind the exhibition “Carl Von Büren. Melano, visioni e vedute” started with lots of boxes full of works, paintings, photos and letters that were found hidden and unused inside the Melano’s municipal warehouse. These treasures are part of the bequest of the artist, who had settled himself in Melano after the Second World War and lived there for the rest of his life, to the Municipality of the city.The construction of the new building for the Town Hall was the perfect opportunity to gather that messy collection of the artist and display it to the public at the inauguration.This was the challenge that the City Council had entrusted to Artrust and that we accepted with enthusiasm, putting our heart, mind and effort into the project that aim to disclose Carl Von Büren’s life.We carried out a scrupulous and strictly philological investigation. Necessary works of cataloguing to fill gaps of information about the artist was put through with the combination of passion, patience and dust from the work. The act of dusting metaphorically meant discovering while extracting works from the box certainly meant bringing back to life and light his story. Today, thanks to Melano Town Hall’s initiative, Carl Von Büren’s works, his paintings of Ticino places and atmospheres, have finally reached the public with this exhibition. Here art has its function of preserving memory as well as collective identity that serve the community’s self-recognition within the sphere of its institutional references.
Patrizia Cattaneo Moresi
Direttrice di Artrust SA
COMUNE DI MELANO
City Administration Offices
via Cantonale 89 – 6818 Melano
Exhibition will be open from October 2 nd to November 20th, 2015.
Monday-Friday from 7.45 to 10.00 / Monday and Wednesday from 16.00 to 18.00
Exhibition and catalogue by Artrust SA.
THE ARTIST
The artistic career of Carl Von Büren spread over a period covering from the second half of the Fifties to the early Nineties of the Twentieth century.
Within his prolific production, the predominant theme is the landscape (Ticino and Italian) with an undeniable romantic inclination. Many works represent lacustrine, mountains and forest landscapes, where the human presence is secondary, almost inexistent. What emerges is a panic fusion with the natural environment, returned to the viewer in all its primordial beauty and strength, so to become tangible manifestation of the weak relationship established between man and absolute.
Sometimes, the forest becomes, for Von Büren, his favorite place for the setting of religious scenes – like processions or moments of silence – lived in intimacy and simplicity of an authentic religious feeling that goes beyond the pompous imposition of a dogma, to return to a pantheistic conception of the connection between God and Nature.
An intimate and private vision, also in the choice of portraits subjects: peasants or family meticulously reported on paper with a few signs of red chalk or charcoal. The female’s nudes, made of oil, are more structured, which inevitably recalled the great examples of Goya, Ingres and Renoir both for the laying and for the pictorial result.
From technical point of view, the artistic activity of Von Büren appears to be strongly shaped by an Impressionist practice. The distinctive feature of his work is the pictorial effect obtained by juxtaposing rapid touches of color next to one another that reflect a vibrant and fugacious, as well as an unstable and transient atmosphere, which is the nature itself.
If some small compositions in which the color is applied almost in its purity using the spatula appear to be more textured, in contrast, some watercolors appear even more evanescent, where the outlines are exfoliated and blended.
The numerous sketches reveal, on one hand, the necessity to note immediately down people, landscapes and feelings, crystallizing them in the purity of the moment; on the other hand, they are silent witnesses of an artistic work based on a careful study of the composition and design, where nothing is left to chance.
CARL VON BÜREN
