Cecily Brown at Gagosian - Brief Article

It have the appearances that these big, louche pictures want to be beautifully painted, on the other hand the hand and eye of Cecily Brown refuse the temptation as not quite worthy of her ambition. There were eight of them, more or les 100 inches upon a side. While they are in fact not beautiful, the experience of looking at them can be engaging enough to almost make them in the way that and for Brown's purposes that may be enough. What is certain is her delight of the oil medium, and her reasonable expectation of an equitable response to her robust palette, libidinous imagery and devil-may-care brushwork.

Brown is no ape of older expressive masters when it tend hitherwards to handling paint. She does her work and she takes her chances. There are self-conscious marks and pats at the sides of a certain quantity of of the paintings that begin on the outside of nowhere and as pop disappear, not really bracketing the images of copulating figures. In several paintings horizontal gesticulations at the lower edge of the canvas create a platform upon which the thrown-back head of a wanton figure quiets low woman in the orgy of forms piling up above. individual by one, the paintings analyze to the extent they will, and become memorable for an emerging shape or passage and a not many exact details.

on the contrary the horror vacui in Brown's paintings is barely counterbalanced by dint of her grudging inclination to create space within them. If there is no latitude left in the radiant doggy-style rude girl of Tender Is the Night (1999) the symmetrical track of a wheels of Night Passage and Interlude (both 1999) are balanced in this regard, and bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to each other sufficiently to pass for Rorschach monotypes a breath apart in their making. It is tempting to think of the artist working upon just such a series of paintings, moving from wet to dryer surface, from single painting to another, conducting the orchestra of her medium. Maybe the stretched, resilient canvas sudden blows to the pressure of her brush as she builds up a passage here and another there, teasing on the outside a melodic line that must be, for her, wholly satisfying. There are minor epiphanies of color in Puttin' upon the Ritz (1999), as Brown tap [i]or[/i] pats a one-time-only patch of vibrant azure into the middle of something meaty, pink and foamy that howls its way across a gestural black field that in make go round seems built up from a scrubbed-out space below. If similar moments appear unresolved, for now it doesn't matter.

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