A Tale of Two Cities 2016

Curator: Albrecht Behmel's "A Tale of Two Cities," completed in 2016, presents a compelling vision. It's an acrylic on canvas diptych, striking for its seemingly endless field of small colorful rectangles. Editor: It’s instantly captivating. I’m drawn in by the sheer density and visual weight. There’s an overwhelming sense of accumulated materials that makes me think of production and construction. Curator: Absolutely. There's a landscape suggested, a horizon line and sky, but the main focus rests upon the geometric aggregation that resembles urban sprawl or a dense network of buildings. The palette, however, remains almost dreamlike, contrasting with the hard-edged shapes. Consider how those pastel blues juxtapose against the built form, imbuing it with a surreal, almost melancholic aura. It prompts you to imagine narratives and layers hidden within each discrete block. Editor: That use of material is fascinating to me. He is making the means of construction so blatantly visible – and I mean that both literally within the landscape of the painting itself, but also in the physical process, using such painstaking, repetitive strokes. The social context of such repetitive action – like labor in factories – makes me question if Behmel is trying to comment on post-industrial society. Curator: That's a very insightful observation. This can be considered within the lens of cultural memory too. Post-industrial architecture frequently mimics organic and vernacular designs, which are imbued into cultural continuity of “home”. Editor: Yes! You can see those tensions and dualities when considering scale. I wonder if his mark-making strategy could be translated into building at an architectural level; can you create monumental buildings from the process of iterative mark making? Or create small modules through design? How can small individual units – those strokes of paint, those workers in the labor force – become monumental when joined as a whole? Curator: A resonant question! What remains significant is that these dualities - geometric yet evocative, vast yet somehow contained, resonate deeply with the complexity of modern existence, of the interplay of tradition and change. Editor: It’s certainly successful at capturing this inherent tension through artistic execution. It’s rewarding when one medium can become both object and statement in such a thoughtful execution.