The possibility of flying

There are not many artists who have painted birds masterfully. It would be tedious to make a list of names, but it will not be in vain to remember the emotion that continues to be provoked by the wing of a roller (a colorful European bird), that watercolor by Albrecht Dürer that is preserved in the Albertina in Vienna. Or the shudder caused by Rebecca Horn’s feathered machines, if we look closer to our present. To paint birds you first have to fall in love with them, and that is what happened to Patrick Gläscher several years ago. Our artist observes both birds in their habitat and in science books and in art. Some time ago he painted imaginary landscapes of the mythical fauna of the city of Buenos Aires, where birds appeared that took a unique role. Anyone who has seen the drawings of John Audubon (1785-1851), that ornithological painter born in Haiti, knows the challenge of painting birds at a 1:1 scale even when the size exceeds the sheet, hence there are very nice solutions, such as to paint a flamingo bending its neck. If we approach our horizons, Guillermo Enrique Hudson (1841-1924) was a naturalist and writer, author of Aves del Plata, among other ornithology books that were pioneering attempts to record the various species of our country. In Audubon’s drawings as in Hudson’s there is as much science as art, and the same can be said of Gläscher’s work. Perhaps this is its most extraordinary potential, being able to combine the precision of a researcher with the freedom of an artist.

Gläscher chooses a meticulous technique that few handle with such talent, graphite; He achieves an almost photographic finish and in the series he presents in Praxis he reduces the palette to white, black and shades of gray. The works are large, something unusual for works in graphite, a rather intimate technique that artists prefer for quick sketches, but which we now find in a grandiloquent dimension, almost as if it were a mural. The same thing happens with the motif he describes, small birds in nature that become larger in his work. What are these birds? There is a preference for the white heron (ardea alba), the black heron (ardea corcoi) and the little white egret (egretta thula); They are not rare, on the contrary, they are found on all continents, they are aquatic birds that look for food in wetlands and usually nest high in trees, that is, they circulate on land, water and air. They are long-legged and beaked, unfriendly towards humans, but friendly among themselves as they live in flocks. This is not the place to describe their behavior, only to point out that they are not only seen very frequently in our fields but also in the reserves near the city. Glascher approaches these birds in an almost scientific way – not for nothing does he worry about titling the works with their taxonomic name -, with a taste for the minute detail in the plumage of the wings or in the plumes, and with an enormous imagination to compose in space. He chooses to paint a bird in flight, not at rest, and there is not one specimen flying through the sky, but several. In the large triptych that is presented there is a deceptively mirror-like composition, and a dynamic asymmetry that confuses the logical mind. If you observe how the herons move, you can see a similarity with chronophotography, since there is a bird that repeats itself successively to give the impression of movement. Towards the end of the 19th century Eadweard Muybridge tried to capture movement (both of men/women and animals) with photography, and our artist makes the same attempt with a much more artisanal technology, graphite. The result is a succession of herons in flight whose necks merge with the birds that precede them, as if there were a miscalculation in the aerial parade. Paradoxically, this dynamism seems to freeze in the air, there is silence and stillness in the scene, as if the birds were settling into the wallpaper of an old English house. The herons that Gläscher paints rise, mirror, absorb, multiply and above all renew the interest not in birds in particular but in the mysteries of Nature in general.

Julio Sánchez Baroni, October 2021