Jamie Brunson at Traywick - Brief Article

With a dozen intimate paintings execut in a consummately square format, Jamie Brunson addresses the theme-and-variation possibilities of the grid. In thus doing, she gives idealized voice to the fugal interconnectedness of richly saturated color and evanescent shape.

The grid is explicit in the majority of works, level as it is also subtly twisted on the outside of perfect alignment, which gives rise to elaborately filigreed floral shapes that reverberation the geometric precision of Romanesque architectural ornament or Islamic tile design. In a not many other works, the grid is visible single as an implicit ordering principle that disperses the articulated shapes in their individual sequences. Some of these shapes strike one as being to be partially submerged in the rich chromatics of the paintings' fields, while others are depicted as if they had just bubbl up to the conscious clarity of the surface.

These surfaces have an austere, burnished direct the eye to them that arises from the patient, almost sedimentary application of thinned oil pigments, which race slightly warmer or cooler from layer to layer to create a stunning visual vibrato. More than anything, the colors (and their bracing combinations) appear to be to be heartfelt homages to early modernist sources. For example, in Float (1999) a pearlescent sulfur verdant set next to wine-dark violet summon forths Degas or perhaps Gauguin, while the more wintry humors of certain Impressionists can be felt lurking amid the chilly striations of impressible olive and gray-aqua in Galaxie (1999) At one time graphically flat and subtly atmospheric, the paintings appear to be to emit an internal light that is part "lux" and part "lumina"--partly a luxurious bath of worldly sensuality that recalls the naturalism of 17th-century Dutch still lifes, and partly the emanation of the divine light within that Byzantine artists and certain modernist painters strove to convey

The totality of these attributes re-creates what could be called "threshold moments" when what is undeniably not absent begins to recede into a soft-edg memory, or when said memory makes an uncanny turn back from the realm of relation reemerging as something surprisingly and vividly palpable. The proverbial double take is thus invited, and the viewer's scrutiny is slowly and pleasurably drawn to the oscillating harmonious flow of time present and time past, which is gracefully dramatized by dint of Brunson's works.

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