Description of my work
Trichotomy and Geometry
“In her Egyptian Triptych Brigitte Binzer-Zitouni translates her subjective experiences on trips to Ancient Egyptian cultural sites into her own personal visual idiom, in a rational mode also informed by the senses, which she has systematically formulated and developed. The bridge between analytic rationality on the one hand and sensuality largely articulated through colour on the other is part of the fascination her work exerts on the viewer, who is caught in its ban…
Associations occur quite naturally to pyramids or rows of columns, given that the four sides of a pyramid are all triangular but the ground plan of the ediHice is a square…
Brigitte Binzer-Zitouni composes her triptychs as three juxtaposed panels. If we look more closely we notice that each panel can work as an independent piece on its own. All three picture panels (in contrast to earlier triptychs by the artist) have the same format, with just a hint of a focus on the motif in the central section. The artist thus deliberately leaves behind the narrative direction of reading in medieval altar triptychs, composing the panels with all their potential independence to form a geometric abstract whole. The way she relates the panels to each other within the overall construction is remarkable, leading to a balanced composition of all the pictorial components.”
Erhard Metz, Frankfurt am Main, Online-Magazine Feuilleton Frankfurt, 9 March 2018 | www.feuilletonfrankfurt.de
Translated by Celia Brown, Freiburg im Breisgau
”Abstraction and concreteness – The work of Brigitte Binzer-Zitouni rewrites the two concepts of concrete and abstract. Squares, triangles, rectangles and strips of different widths fit together into different compositions to form wide-ranging outcomes, or at least triptychs. The sequence of individual panels is by no means fixed, but, even in a crowded installation, can always bring in a new order, even form a new image.
The compositions become more concrete when they refer to specific definitions. This becomes significant in the small Tunisian glossary, which was created during one of the artist’s visits to Tunisia. Here, Binzer has compiled and translated important terms associated with tradition and culture into simple symbols. There are words like Djebel, Erg, Kasbah, Medina, Souk and Zitouna. With the latter she makes a gesture towards her private world. The choice of terms, the painterly transformation of the foreign words into an easily comprehensible symbolism, gives Binzer’s subjective impressions a general relevance.
The Tunisian glossary is just one example of the German artist’s work that reflects the influences of her stay in Tunisia. This is not surprising, since Tunisia has become her second home. So you can find the pale colors of the atmosphere of the country expressed in the white and yellow of the desert sand, in the expanses of blue sky and sea.“
Dr. Viola Hildebrandt-Schat, Frankfurt am Main, 2009
Translated by Peter Cross, Berlin und Frankfurt am Main
“By doing without playful elements or ones applied simply for decorative purposes, the attentive viewer senses, behind all the geometry, the lines made by a ruler and the precisely defined surfaces of the cooly-constructed compositions at hand, something else: the emotional, passionate inner involvement of the artist in her work.”
Nikolaus Jungwirth “Die Kunst des Denkens“, Frankfurter Rundschau 8.12.1996
“What makes Brigitte Binzer‘s triptychs particularly striking is that the colours she uses appear only as specific forms. Red is always in the shape of a rectangle, blue is never any other shape than a triangle and yellow always appears in uniform stripes. Only the non-colour black is used more freely. It fills in – as stripes or in irregular forms – the surface, amongst the predetermined shapes of the other colours.
The functions of the colours are thereby determined by their forms. Red and blue, already spatially and emotionally the most intense contrast in the colour spectrum, also create an extreme diametrical tension formally. Yellow‘s hue is weakened by being crossed by black. What dominates is the value of the form‘s appearance. Depending on the direction of the stripes, this value is either rather static (both in horizontal and vertical compositions) or (in diagonal compositions) quite a dynamic surface unit that communicates between the blue/red tension. Black, on the other hand, by filling out the rest of the surfaces, often creates a kind of bond between the three parts of the triptych.
The creative process the artist uses to paint her colour surfaces happens in stages. She slowly fills them in by dabbing a thick round paint-saturated brush – a process that takes hours. The material she works on (a wooden plate beneath ensures stability) lies on the studio floor. The painter kneels before it and becomes immersed in the repetitive movement. During this meditative activity the composition of the surfaces is subject to a considerable dynamic of its own. The resulting colour fields seem, because of the varying pigment densities, to be gently moving. So there is a “hard“ as well as a “soft“ composition to the surfaces themselves, a structural contrast immediately apparent to the viewer. This significantly adds to the aesthetic tension of the oeuvre.”
Dr. Thomas Röske, “Brigitte Binzer. Triptychs. 1984-1992“, Frankfurt/Main 1992