Cecily Brown’s work is in the order of delicious maximalism and has by no means ever been an easy read. Indeed, certain passages in her paintings are busy beyond perception, and one may even ask after a long standing view are they occluded indecipherable visual entities, or rather, rapturous musical movements akin to a Joan Michell work, but with even more muscularity (and where Mitchell abandoned the figure totally after ‘’Figure and the City” [1950], Brown boldly continues on).
The stop-action motion cinematic brushwork suddenly has become epic as has her dance partnership of figuration and abstraction, between which she sees no difference, as she has indicated in interviews and elsewhere. Her visual vocabulary is of a language which speaks of a state of becoming, and which has stunned many.
She loves the Old Masters, and it is breathtaking to see a painter who can regenerate that vocabulary to such an extent in such an innovative manner.
That all said, welcome to Brown’s first solo exhibition since her career retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023. Here she takes Peter Paul Reubens and Jan Breughel the Elder’s most famous collaborative series “The Five Senses” as her point of departure and the works in the main gallery can come at you like giant multi-storied virtual cruise ships of sensory detail.
It may leave you wondering aloud, with other guests, until you see lobsters, oysters, cherries, and other tangible items begin to emerge in the pictures.
The Five Senses suite takes up the entire main room but just off it hangs “Pretty Stories and Funny Pictures” (2023), which is a bit off the main leitmotif, but is an atmospheric, very rich canvas.
The women appear as Regency duo (as if in a Sir Thomas Lawrence portrait) in a dark brown chocolatey background, sometimes gone black. Therein, a comic look comes across one of the women’s faces in a cavernous interior, an imagined architectural scene. This works also in the pastiche subtext: it almost seems to have a touch of John Currin’s sense of parody to it.
As the artist has indicated, worked, and hoped for, these pieces can take days to unravel and after multiple viewings still offer up new revelations. Though cherries may be evident immediately in one, another soon gives up oysters, mussels, bouquets, and groups of pears. Les Mademoiselles d’Avignon suddenly materializes in others.
One particularly arresting canvas is “Emily at Play”, seemingly a portrait of a woman on a bed with her body disconnected from her head (which offers up an excellent sense of presence with her deep eyes of infinite black reminiscent of a void). Perhaps this strange body arrangement, with a full buttock back view, could be seen as an allusion to the anatomical misadventures which can occur while creating a work of art with artificial intelligence.
This relatively small for Brown exhibition is in line with the artist’s acclaim as the current great songstress of figuration and abstraction married together in a great rolling thunder.
Cecily Brown , The Five Senses, Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 West 21st Street. Show ends December 7.
