We are pleased to present the second solo show of Dutch artist Bram Braam (*1980) at galerieburster berlin.

Bram Braam's work seems to overflow due to a remarkable tangible complexity in the material varietyof his works and therefore in what precedes the creative act itself. The concept of Utopia turns out tobe the fundamental interpretative key that allows one to gain a broader understanding of Braam’s workand somehow untangle the threads that make up the stratification of his works. The word Utopiaetymologically derives from the ū = ‘non’ and tópos = ‘place’ and therefore has the the hidden meaningof non-place. This non-place is an impossible place, an imaginary architecture, a vision which points inthe direction of a non-futuristic future.

Braam deals with this concept in a circular way through a vortex of reinvented materials, found objects,assembled furniture, rags of city walls, and almost any element can be exemplary of a constructivisthistoricity understood not only in relation to building but also in semantic terms. Architecture, for Braam,can be found in the buildings of Le Corbusier, in abandoned buildings, and in the graphic signs left by aperson passing by. It is the historicity of the environmental evolution that Braam prefers to focus upon.

But in this vortex of signs that finds completeness in the creation of large sculptures, in which eachconstituent element is never randomly chosen, it is possible to highlight two trajectories that areindefinitely covered by the term mentioned above: Utopia. These are two lines that are not rectilinear,curved or curved again, and that deal with pairs such as new and old, real and false, natural andartificial, original and remodeled, construction and destruction. Through his works Bram Braam addresses Utopia both as an environmental utopia with a functionalist and constructivist mold thatcharacterized 20th century modernism and as a non-place utopia. It is a fairly complicated dialectic inwhich what is identified as a possible place with its own recognizable identity becomes non-place assoon as the possibility of its being or of its lasting decay. At the same time we are witnessing theawareness of the non-place as the only place possible.

The coexistence of different architectural styles, of maps that correspond to several political periods, ofsigns that define the experience of an urban or civilized environment – is it even possible to find one thatis completely virgin, without residues of humanity? Of elements that highlight the mixture of differentstyles, sanctioning them with the impossibility to find a beginning and declaring the absolute intertwiningof one with the other, are at the base of this non-place place whose complex stratification is always re-proposed differently from the work of Braam.

This stratification, this overlap that actually presents itself as a chronological plot, finds a powerfulexplanation in the artist's wall works. It is about real walls, parts of cities where the calmness ofbecoming is tangible, the fascination of non-place as place, the absence of abuse and therefore thepresence of a quietness made up of voices from the past and the present that have always and foreverlooked at a hypothetical future in a utopian way; coming to terms with a real utopia made of rubble andscratched walls.

Domenico de Chirico, 2019