Fritz Bornstück: You Are Here (X)

In our misdirected age it seems a rare immunity to wan- der abroad without an allocated or determined sense of final destination. Yet as the figures in the current series of Fritz Bornstück paintings sojourn on arrested journey or a voyage into nature, at the same time they carry with them the material accretions of the world, the used, abused, and abject consumer objects that they might reasonably have left behind. Bornstück is a painter-sculptor who creates paintings with a highly personal sense of simultaneity between his imagined subject matter and the material application of paint. As is familiar from his unique studio practice, the latest series of paintings evoke feelings of conjured imagining and investigative uses of facture, figurative images with the mastery of painterly means and material procedures needed to accomplish them. We might see in these new paint- ings an attempt at visual synthesis between subject and object, the prescient subject a journeying figure on a quest inferring a forward projection, and objects seen often as indexical emblems of memorial nostalgia and/ or junk-shop obsolescence.