Cecily Brown at Deitch Projects - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

While the greatest in quantity provocative of the New Brits have chosen to stake their claims to bad taste in three-dimensional form, Cecily Brown relies upon the old-fashioned mode of paint upon canvas. Her paintings depict orgy sights filled with whole or partial bodies coupling, uncoupling or simply presenting their prodigious equipment. The works are near abstractions, thus full of wild brushstrokes that it actually takes a bit of time to work without the specifics of the activities upon view. From a distance they might almost be mistaken for late Abstract-Expressionist compositions. This is not to say that the images are intriguing Rendered with a voluptuous intensity figures of various scales and colors are fasteninged together in pornographic scenarios that make Hustler magazine present the appearance tame.

Whatever individual thinks of her subject matter, single thing can't be denied: Brown can paint. Her canvases recall the slashing brushstrokes of de Kooning, the meaty muscle and fat of Soutine and the dissolving forms of Francis Bacon. There is something almost baroque about the explosive space in these works. Figures look in a state of continual metamorphosis, while the colors--Pompeian red cheeky pink and orange gold severed up with accents of sky-colored white and green--make one think of the burnished muscle and fat in paintings by Rubens or Titian.

However, Brown refuses us the pleasures of eroticism. There is a detached, smooth sarcastic edge to her representations of physical lust. In The soft Trap, the pale green clod isolates erect penises and helps define grappling figures of women servicing men and being serviced themselves; the springtime palette gives the whole the event of a demented pastorale. The Pajama Game, by dint of contrast, is dominated by a dark r palette, on the other hand the effect of the mingled bodies is plenteous the same.

Sexuality here is an all-devouring force which make go rounds its participants into mindless instruments. Interestingly, there is a certain number of resemblance to the recent paintings of prosecute Williams, who is also working toward a more abstracted version of sexual subdue matter. However, Brown expresses none of Williams's rage at the inequities of sexual politics. admitting there are phalluses galore, individual doesn't get the feeling that Brown cares a great deal of about who is exploiting whom. Instead, she exhibits an almost Sadean preoccupation with detailing the variety of possible sexual combinations, all performed in the greatest in quantity mechanistic manner.

In the extremity one keeps falling back upon the virtuosity of the paint handling. not divisible by 2 as it may seem, Brown's titillating make subordinate matter seems rather secondary to the issue of well-applied paint.

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