Artist Statement | Frank Breuer

Parallel to my Logos series, I photographed warehouses and World War I memorials in northern France. War memorials are a built culture of remembrance, an architectural representation of the suffering of individual soldiers and the civilian population as a whole. At the same time, this suffering is negated by its translation into a sublime timelessness. The architectural elements become a sign. The material and the physical meet the personal and the social.

For me, there was always a palpable coldness to the monuments, to which I responded with the "objectivity" of photography. The overwhelming monument on site is translated photographically, collected and juxtaposed with others in a typology. In the end, my series is perhaps like a construction kit of monuments from which you can see the elements of which they are made. Archetypal architectural lines run through the various structures rooted in the culture and history of a given society. This approach softens the sublime meaning in order to deal with these highly content-laden subjects.

The logos also have a sculptural character, as do the warehouses and containers. The latter resemble three-dimensional pixels that travel around the world and can be found everywhere. They are standardized, everyone knows how much goes into them, what it costs to design products of a certain size. All elements become a perfectly calculable quantity. This is also true of photography. There is a negative of a certain size and prints of it in standard formats. Ultimately, you scale and transport the objects in front of the lens and the images in the same way.  

In addition, the cubic structures of the warehouses and transport containers are built signs with a certain monumentality that engages the viewer. Of course, these signs have different connotations, combined with other ideas behind the logos, that is, the promises of advertising that suggest certain lifestyles and characteristics of products. This continues in photography: it reproduces the spatial character and reduces it to a surface, itself becoming an object with an aesthetic dimension. The picture seduces you and you ask yourself: Why do I find a container beautiful? This aspect of seduction is interesting to me. The ideas behind the monuments are transferred to the world of objects and become something alive, competitive and sometimes uncontrollable.

Globalization manifests itself in the growth of suburbs and industrial estates. I have noticed how logos and their promises are physically reflected in the world. They are supposedly immaterial; they are primarily an idea, a fiction underpinned by meaning and desire. You don’t notice what’s behind them, like the containers you don’t look into. And yet they are eating their way into our landscape. Agricultural land is being turned into storage areas for short-lived consumer products. This became suddenly apparent in the 1990s, and continues unabated today.