Cecily Brown "Footsie" 2000 10 color lithograph on Somerset Textured White 46"x36" edition 9/33 published by ULAE

Cecily Brown "Boy Trouble (LG)" Oil on canvas 1999 72" x 72"

At a time when the publishing industry turns out anthologies of "flash" or "sudden" fiction, 2 or 3 page short stories bound in slim volumes, British painter Cecily Brown's fevered canvasses evince a novelistic attention to detail. Applying paint in abrupt, staccato strokes, Brown builds up a thick pelt of viscous marks that spontaneously swirl and overlap in volcanic fields of color. "Long is the new chic. Length is the new brevity," Adam Gopnik recently gushed in the New Yorker, and this is certainly true of Brown's labor intensive accretions of molten color that cheat the quick glance, but reward the patient viewer. Austerity and restraint is clearly not part of the game plan in her first solo at the Gagosian Gallery.

Since the 29 year old Brown arrived in New York from London five years ago she's been carving out a "space between abstraction and figuration"‹ opening up a frenzied zone between the two extremes where the imagination loses itself in the sheer pleasure of the paint. "The place I'm interested in is where the mind goes when it's trying to make up for what isn't there. When something is just suggested," she explained. And if uniting abstraction and figuration seems like having your cake and eating it too‹a way of defensively hedging your bets‹one need only take in Tender is the Night, an imposing 8'x 9' foot primer on virtuoso paint handling. Undulating, static lines hover in suspended animation, folding in on themselves. Loose eddies of yellow pigment hint to disembodied forms rising from a shimmering murk.

Which is not to say that Brown's paintings rely on old school, Ab-ex tropes of angst ridden drama, or rorschachs of alienation that fueled the 50s rise of, predominantly male, cult of personality. It's not that they're whimsical or light, or that they don't possess tortured existential analogies if one searches for them. It's just that with titles like Puttin on the Ritz and Suddenly Last Summer, Brown finesses a wider range of emotions, and I might add, lived experience, than earlier generations that strove for a pure distillation of a single mood. Puttin on the Ritz is decidedly somber with its craggy fields of black and grey‹a looming cold front blanketing tiny deposits of red and orange. Huddled and a bit claustrophobic, Ritz's sense of compacted tension is leavened by the expansive and airy Interlude which hangs adjacent to it.

The name itself seems to suggest a pause or brief respite from some of the of the more dense compositions in the show. Where Tender is the Night has a kind of dynamic centrifugal force, that captures the nuances of motion as well the uniqueness of Brown's stroke, Interlude prides itself on stillness and a measured quietude. Large swaths of creamy monochrome interrupted by an occasional arabesque show Brown in a more relaxed and contemplative state, mustering enough self-possession to realize that her paintings need not always flirt with chaotic profusion.

The orgiastic glee of her earlier paintings at Deitch with their writhing genitalia, tended to literalize the equation of sensuous paint with the sensuous body. Skeptics claimed Brown was a cynical pretender to a tin crown that wed DeKooning or Bacon with porn. She countered persuasively: "I want to transcribe the feeling of heat inside your body, inside your mouth, the feeling of skin on skin, and flesh and graspings. I want it caressing; I want it brutal and tender and everything at once." Here at Gagosian, Brown has lost none of her sensuality even while jettisoning all allusions to the human body. The syncopation of her forms has a complex rhythm, but they suggest another musical analogy, Mozart's Farewell Symphony, where the final violinist sits alone on the stage, as his counterparts, one by one, take their leave of him.

From a Cecily Brown review by David Hunt for Time Out Magazine, New York.

See also: