I like Cecily Brown’s work. Her figures emerge and get lost within dense painterly surfaces, which often have a nod to the alloverness of abstract expressionism. Sometimes they are masses of figures, piled up like abstract shapes in some filthy orgy. Other times the spatial setting is more literal, the classic window box setting put through a de Kooning blender, pastoral idylls recalling renaissance depictions of figures ‘courting’ in the idyllic countryside.
The slipperyness of her surfaces attracts me, its not the meaty flesh of Saville, the ripped open flesh of Bacon or the fleshy flesh of Freud. It’s a sexual flesh, the very spreading of the medium, its seeming fluidity, as if on the verge of coagulating. It speaks lucidly of the transformation between states of matter, be that paint or flesh. The eroticism and sexual allure of both is not presented as some academic diatribe, but merely presents itself as the result of a painter instinctively aware of both.
I don’t know how much more Cecily Brown’s work does for me. Certainly anything else it does is in direct association with this kind of sensibility, delighting in the playfulness of her understanding of matter, colour and mark. They don’t seem to engage me beneath the surface. It’s more like a night of passion, which whilst you might come back for more, you don’t see yourself developing a truly meaningful relationship.
The slipperyness of her surfaces attracts me, its not the meaty flesh of Saville, the ripped open flesh of Bacon or the fleshy flesh of Freud. It’s a sexual flesh, the very spreading of the medium, its seeming fluidity, as if on the verge of coagulating. It speaks lucidly of the transformation between states of matter, be that paint or flesh. The eroticism and sexual allure of both is not presented as some academic diatribe, but merely presents itself as the result of a painter instinctively aware of both.
I don’t know how much more Cecily Brown’s work does for me. Certainly anything else it does is in direct association with this kind of sensibility, delighting in the playfulness of her understanding of matter, colour and mark. They don’t seem to engage me beneath the surface. It’s more like a night of passion, which whilst you might come back for more, you don’t see yourself developing a truly meaningful relationship.