Christian Brechneffs new pastels, drawn in various locations around the world, indicate a remarkably direct, close relationship-rather startling intimacy and engagement-with nature, even more intense, I venture to say, than that of the Impressionists. These 19th Century artists retained a certain "scientific" distance and detachment-they wanted to observe the details of atmosphere and light, not immerse themselves in the totality of nature-that Brechneff altogether abandons, without abandoning any of his artistic ability and awareness, indeed, the acumen of his hand. He remains sharp-eyed and dexterous, even as he hurls himself emotionally into the volcano of explosive light that the sky becomes, recording it with a responsive devotion to its changing nuances that never loses sight of its over-all impact. Indeed, the aesthetics of untamed nature-its altogether phenomenal appearance-and the aesthetics of spontaneous gesture seamlessly converge in Brechneffs pastels, a sure sign that the "truth" of nature has been encountered and mastered. He is a kind of Jacob wrestling with the angel of light, with his art receiving its blessing. His pastels are mystical epiphanies that nonetheless remain adroitly focused-a romantic art that carefully details the titanic forces at work in sacred nature.

It requires a peculiar courage and daring to follow the course of the sun as it moves across the sky, dramatically changing the face of the land and sea beneath it, and of the sky itself. Brechneff studies its effects without being blinded by its brilliance. Indeed, he has to identify with that brilliance to transmute its dynamics into art. He always chooses primordial settings, where the interplay of the four archetypal elements-fire and water, earth and air, to list them in antithetical pairs-becomes as self-evident as it will ever. They integrate even as they remain tensely at odds, preserving their particularity. The brilliance of Brechneffs pastels is that they convey this simultaneity of conflict and convergence-a sense of natures creative contradictoriness and underlying unity.

Brechneffs landscapes have never been inhabited, and thus retain their wild beauty. They are a raw terrain, vivid with unconstrained color, fluid forms, and insistent texture. The Indian Ocean at Rocktail Bay in South Africa, the Pacific Ocean at Haramara in Mexico, and the North Atlantic Ocean at East Hampton in the United States, are so many places where the end of the world occurs-magical spaces where the "beyond" becomes visible and sure-footed, indeed, where one can carry on an artistic romance with its magic. Voyaging to these visionary places in order to experience the ecstacy inherent in pure nature-to have an "oceanic experience"-Brechneff conveys a sense of its majesty, still miraculous in a world of technological miracles.

Brechneff works in series, keeping up with the changes in light effected by time, seemingly spontaneously. That is, his pastels are not only site-specific but time-specific. The light-and with it the landscape-is different at dawn, in the afternoon, and at dusk, and Brechneff captures that shifting difference with remarkable fidelity. Space and time become one in each pastel, as do light and landscape. Space becomes suffused with light-light is space-which dissolves the solid landscape without effacing its form, which is revealed to be as dynamic and fluid as light. But the mystery and power of color is what most grips one in Brechneffs pastels. From the dark, surging Pacific land-sea-skyscape, erratically streaked with tentative light at 4:30 AM on March 17, 2001 to the full-fledged, color-ripening light at 7:00 AM that same day at that same place-which Brechneff never left-one witnesses the dramatic unfolding of complicated color. Luminosity is embedded in it, energizing it.

Movement is the substance of Brechneffs pastels, which have to be read in the order in which they were made in order to get the full, almost overwhelming sense of motion that informs them. It is fundamentally the movement of time, which cannot be stopped, and whose hidden face is felt in the dramatic movement from darkness to light, which brings with it the movement from one rich, subtle, sudden color to another. It is the pressure of time-of the moment-that one feels in Brechneffs pastels, and that tenses their colors.

Each pastel is a transitional moment in the panoramic movement of an ever-changing nature. Each pastel is a "passage" in the double sense of that word. It is a passage in the grand, open-ended landscape painting with each temporal sequence of pastels forms-a singular segment of an expanding totality, with each segment containing the grandeur and drama of the whole. Each pastel is also the unique record of an actual passage-a very particular passing moment, never to return-in nature. Thus each temporal sequence of pastel "moments" has as much validity as any other. The sequence of pastels and individual pastels are parallel to each other, confirming that none has more priority than the other: every moment is exceptional, and demands an exceptional state of mind to be truly "seen." Taken together, Brechneffs sequences convey the sublimity of nature-his totalizing arrangement of them in a grid, as though they were a parts of one, enormous, all-over abstract mural, suggests as much which is especially evident when nature is left to its own luminous devices.

Brechneffs land-sea-skyscapes transcend the picturesque by reason of their peculiarly abstract sublimity. Indeed, they are not so much pictures of nature but articulations of what the nineteenth century English landscape painter James Barry called "transitory moments of fascination," in which the "splendor" of the infinite becomes visible.