BetonGold

Sustainability and cultural history entwine the metaphorical composite BetonGold with which Bernd Caspar Dietrich launches a new aesthetic dialogue. After a cycle of over fifty WHEELs with concentric narratives since 2013, Dietrich deals with the dialectical charm and polarising aesthetics of concrete and concrete surfaces. In doing so, he also deepens his canon of materials through the historical material of concrete.

The architect and artist Le Corbusier designed and left behind an entire "concrete" district in the mid-1960s in the French industrial town of Firminy near Saint-Étienne. The expansive, simple geometric forms, the martial fair-faced concrete constructions still convey today - even if they are getting on in years due to the renovation backlog - an idealised claim to focus on the social aspects of modern architecture with powerful authenticity and an ethical will: Short distances connect the school, sports stadium, youth and cultural centre, a housing complex and the church. "Rough, austere, honest" is how the modern architectural style of brutalism conveys itself "a generic term for very diverse aesthetic movements", according to art historian Nikolaus Bernau, "but all of them thought that modern, industrialised mass societies needed art that was as powerful as possible". That is why the French word "brut" translates into brutalisme with "rough", "coarse", "austere" or "honest", so much more fitting than the English or German word "brutal", which has the undertone of violence. Yet the architects of those years wanted to liberate the users of their buildings spiritually, to make them see, to "offer them sensuality instead of commercial design”.

With BetonGold, Bernd Caspar Dietrich takes up the multi-perspective discours his paintings. With his 2.20 x 2.00 metre canvases, which bear titles such as "Building Lion" and "Skyscraper", he delivers masterpieces of craftsmanship that - whether they like it or not - lead to conversations about responsibility. "The aestheticisation of surfaces is important for me to talk about elemental values," says BCD. "Power, ownership, gentrification and the elementary need to dwell. Is housing a human right? What social responsibility is derived from it if I afford a square metre in a charming city location for 60,000 euros? Whoever takes a space also has a responsibility to give something back to the community and to protect it!”

Gold has been used for thousands of years as a ritual raw material, a symbol of the noble and beautiful and a means of payment. Hardly any other material is as durable, valuable and enchanting, touched by its warm shine and the power it exudes. Gold is a rare metal on our planet, around a thousand tons of rock are processed to extract just four grams of gold. Is the collateral rock used for concrete? Be that as it may, concrete and the master builders' research into durable materials for building houses also go back many thousands of years. BetonGold provides cause for discourse: from its visual appeal to its actual value.

By Hella Sinnhuber