Artists' Artists - Steven Claydon

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jagers in de Sneeuw (The Hunters in the Snow), 1565

I recently fulfilled an ambition by visiting the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. My prime objective was a room containing three paintings from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s series representing the months; in particular, The Hunters in the Snow (1565). I spent several hours there absorbing the paintings, accompanied by a bevy of nervous attendants.

This completed a full circle for me. As a child, I had somehow obtained a small Thames & Hudson pocket edition, with nice cropped details and full-bleed reproductions, of Bruegel’s vivid world. I automatically considered these pictures a species of historical science-fiction and, certainly, geological transmutation: mountains geographically transplanted from the Alps and spliced on to the Low Countries.

Thanks to the then-peerless broadcaster Channel 4, I was lucky enough to see Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris (1961). The surprising use of a suite of Bruegel’s paintings orbitting a sentient morphing planet of churning phantasms shocked me and confirmed my impres­sion of the artist’s work as a prism or conduit, an experience highlighted by Eduard Artemyev’s beautiful electronic soundtrack. The use of these works by Tarkovsky as a metaphor, via a dimensional prism or lens, for a kind of introspective, existential time travel and as a synchronized parallel for encountering extraterrestrial life seemed, to me, to be a very natural conclusion.

Last year, I showed a piece catalyzed by my impressions of these five Breugel paintings as part of a larger presentation at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva. The paintings themselves derived from contemporary sources but, for me, they extended themselves laterally, prosthetically and historically. I borrowed the framing devices from Tarkovsky’s film and presented them on a faceted, curved wall, that also served as a greyscale used for screen calibration.