REBECCA BRODSKIS | The Passengers

About

“I am a Passenger” is a line from the song by Iggy Pop of the same name. “And I ride, and I ride.” Through the dark corners of the city and below the stars that appear in the empty sky. “You know it looks so good tonight.” It actually does look good, when Rebecca Brodskis seeks to transform the status of being a passenger in the underground into a more permanent state of being. She portrays individuals, yet also couples and small groups of figures. 

They are primarily young faces, also of black people or women wearing headscarves. Mostly depicted en face, but also once rotating like crazy around the pole in the train compartment – a sort of metaphysical ‘pole dance’ in the presence of madness. Revealingly, this picture is titled, “The light at the end of the tunnel” (2022). The fact that the windows of the supposed train compartment sometimes look like barred light openings in a prison brings another dimension into play – these passengers might possibly not be travelling voluntarily.

Rebecca Brodskis, born in Paris in 1988, spent her childhood between France and Morocco in a type of permanent migratory condition that bequeathed her a multitude of milieus and languages, yet also situations of lighting and excitements of colour which the trained European normally first comes to know as a traveller in adulthood. In her colour palette, carefully graded tones of yellow dominate, contrasted with green, orange and blue flecks of colour – mostly in sharply coloristic delimitation. Rebecca Brodskis describes herself as a figurative painter, nevertheless ‘with a twist’. The artistic reference points reveal themselves immediately as well: Christian Schad, Otto Dix, and in general the Neue Sachlichkeit of the 1920s. Nevertheless, filtered through a post-colonial, post-millennial sensitivity that harks back to certain creative elements, yet imparts a completely new context to them. The ‘retour a l’ordre’, that after the First World War led back to the object, to a clear pictorial concept and to an objectifying manner of representation, can no longer be a universal pictorial programme in the epoch of Post-Everything, but only an individual form of appropriation of that which is the case in the world. 

Rebecca Brodskis has chosen this path in order, on the one hand, to connect to specific representational traditions of the global South, and on the other hand to lend artistic contours to her perception of the human figure as an endless landscape. “In my pictures, I attempt to use impressions of moments from daily life,” says the artist. “I like the idea that art marks these interstices / these interzones, where everything is possible. Reality coalesces with the imagination and, consciously or unconsciously, opens the doors for a deeper introspection.”

Thomas Miessgang, 2022 / translated by Sarah Cormack