By Trevor Winkfield, 2005
Brice Brown: Compasses are banished
One of Marcel Duchamp’s unused ideas for the Large Glass involved employing the Wilson-Lincoln system (i.e. like the portraits which seen from the left show Wilson, seen from the right show Lincoln). A concertina’d vision which occurred also in Dali’s critical-paranoia method (turn the photograph of the African village on its side and it is transformed into a head), let alone the numerous popular cartoons depicting viewers standing on their heads before abstract canvases, the better to understand ‘Modern Art.’
Multiple viewpoints and the opportunities for varied interpretations they provide are just some of the many gifts modernism presented to us a century ago. And despite the license it provided for willful obfuscation, it has become a staple component of most artists’ lexicons. Lurking on a shelf in Brice Brown’s subterranean studio just south of Manhattan’s Canal Street, a book on Giovanni di Paolo (one of Brown’s favored artists) bears, on its rear cover, one of di Paolo’s illuminations for Dante’s Paradiso. Depicting the story of Piccarda and Costanza, it shows on the right two workmen demolishing a wall, a wall whose jagged edges evoke (but do not represent) the human profile: one thing doubles as another. It is, above all, a poetic procedure.
This question of “What is it,” quickly followed by “Where are we?” and that old but still vibrant saw, “Is it abstract or is it figurative?” comprise three of the salient features of Brown’s recent work, where compasses are forbidden: North can be South, and often the center is found in a corner. Like Giovanni di Paolo (and early Sienese painters in general), Brown delights in compressing a clutch of episodes into a single scene. Not necessarily narrative episodes, either, but painterly events, since as he’s discovered, abstract marks can carry representational weight, and the right green can have as much narrative force as a mouth… painting can be a language, after all.
When Brown was twelve years old, he began to identify with chickens, and subsequently established a chicken language, replacing each letter of our human alphabet with a fowl equivalent. A new language was thus invented, understood solely by Brown and another friend (and not a feathered one, either). It comes as no surprise that shortly after this phase, he discovered the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, another linguist fascinated with the color of vowels. These two strands -the linguistic and the visual- only came together relatively recently for Brown, after he had earlier experimented with film (that ideal, but prohibitively expensive commingling of the visual with the verbal). The immediacy of painting, as opposed to the lengthy process of filming, editing and distribution, was hard to resist.
But it was his personal discovery of the sestina form in poetry that activated his brush more than anything else. Brown himself has explained how: "Unlike the sonnet, there are no rhyme or metrical constraints. The form relies on a strictly prescribed repetition of end words to form six stanzas of these six end words. Following the stanzas is a triplet called the envoi that is three lines long, using two of the six end words per line. The overall formation is more easily understood as a visual diagram, and therefore looks like this: ABCDEF, FAEBDC, CFDABE, ECBFAD, DEACFB, BDFECA. The envoi is commonly BE, DC, AF, though variations exist. By working with the sestina, I gave myself permission to integrate recognizable visual information into a highly formal abstract structure: in a perverted sense, the strictures of the poem form liberated my sign language."
Strictures that, in a visual sense, found expression in the loose horizontals and verticals underlying most of Brown’s compositions. Discreetly planted atop this grid rests a sign language whose dictionary, under the letter “S,” defines streaked, spongy, swiped, saturated and stained as possible methods of applying paint. This is what is meant by an artist’s language… which has nothing to do with mere style. It is an unseen text which guides the brush, and eventually determines the composition. (One suspects that Brown only considers certain of his paintings finished when his brushstrokes have run the gamut from adipose to zigzag).
Lush, parched, flat or knobbly- a blind person could feel his way across these surfaces, though they’d never know when they’d reached safety: The terrain is continuously uncertain. At some points paint has obviously been bought by the tonnage, its viscous glistenings so thick it even smells like paint. Adjacent, a scarified patch shows dietary excess: The canvas tooth peeks through. Like his textures, Brown’s colors have not been put in a blender, but remain distinct and independent. Initially, Brown resisted the use of vivid colors, his first mature work having a palette based on earth and nocturnal tones. Even as recently as three years ago mauves and sunlit yellows struggled to disentangle themselves from their murky bases. Confronting his paintings of that time was akin to peering into a haze-filled aquarium. But in these recent paintings, an almost Technicolor brightness has insinuated tonal clashes into a world now devoid of cobwebs and dust, a world increasingly evoking (albeit temporarily?) the landscape. Or is that Mother Nature herself, red in tooth and claw? Time to consult the Wilson-Lincoln system once more.