Art/ Glenn Brown

Glenn Brown
Gagosian Gallery Chelsea, NYC April 2007

Walking into the first of two rooms devoted to the paintings and sculptures of the English artist Glenn Brown, it is impossible, despite the appealing screech of the large neon-hued paintings, not to first align oneself to the lone sculpture, "The Sound of Music" (1995-2007). A skeleton of a bare, iconic table is wispily encrusted with scabs of multi-colored dried paint that appear to be trying to escape from the table surface and legs, rather than that these ragged paint layers were applied to the structure, as logic would say must be the case. Is the table sloughing off its unique and particular non-essentialness, ultimately revealing the rather elegant but ho-hum mid-century clean-lined ideal table form within? The plexiglass "cover" only adds to the feeling that the whole thing, table and paint- which are not entirely distinguishable as separate from each other- might up and away if not for the Cinderella casing.

The second room contains the other sculpture in the show, "Life is Empty and Meaningless" (2005). Similarly encased, it is a craggy oversize cubistic portrait bust with bowed head and, just possibly, little horns. Composed of tactile, 3-D strokes of paint on what uncannily feels like a hollow core, reds, blues and greens, on the figure's right side blend with creamy white, melting into coral, pistachio and sky blue; the coloration of the left side is dark, defaulting to deep purple. Again, it is hard to say if the paint is coming or going, obfuscating or revealing; certainly it is "doing" something. Both sculptures speak to the truth that it is the paint itself which is neither empty nor meaningless.

These works are key to the nine meticulously crafted paintings. The paintings all share the device of a trompe l'oeil effect that hilariously mimics the 3-D impasto of the sculptures, as if the images were fed into a Photoshop paintbrush tool, except not; they could also be tediously exact renderings of carnival-colored twisted rag dolls- in most cases the composition suggests larger than life portraiture. The end result is a precision of execution that becomes meditative, like following the line in a Celtic knotted border. The image is flat and unpainterly; there is no attempt to seduce kinesthetically with the paint surface- in fact, these paintings barely register as objects, despite their insistent visual presence. They are as impossible to "enter" as they are to ignore.

Many of the works have source references from Fragonard and other non-copy-righted artists of the past. Additional human or creature body parts seem to be emerging from or receding back into the central shapes, but the most powerful works are more ambiguous. "Alabama Song" (2007), perhaps the strongest painting in the show, could be an image of a chicken or rooster- amusingly humble, or, the source of life and its first dilemma: chicken or egg? Is it being torn in half, or cloning itself, or, are two birds mating or fighting to death, with featherlike squiggles flying off into the slightly atmospheric coral background or racing toward them, building blocks of future generations? Is it the violence of creation or destruction? It states its presence as emphatically as it denies identification.