Brice Brown and Don Joint at Francis M. Naumann

Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Edward Leffingwell

At first glance, the artists of this "visual marriage" seem to say little to each other over the apparent distance that separates their styles of painting. Brice Brown's oils on linen or canvas are fleshy and voluptuous, containing within their highly wrought surfaces a vocabulary of images the artist locates in the sestina, a poetic form introduced by Provencal and Italian troubadours during the 12th century. Don Joint's oils on panel seem worlds away in their hard edge clarity, being composed of lucid geometric shapes and unsullied, vibrant colors organized within formats that refer to architectural devices common in old-master paintings. More than sharing intellectual and expressive underpinnings, the paintings were created in the same studio, where both men have worked for eight years. According to gallery materials, they are domestic partners, and although they choose not to seek legal recognition for their union, they elected to celebrate and express support for the same-sex partners who do in the form of this exhibition.

The sestina bases its forward movement on repetitions of words that refer or twist back on each other. Brown's repeated images include the heart, bird, crown, flower, number eight and twister. Sestina: Twister Bird, Orange (2003) is a 30-by-24-inch composition of quadrants, with a swirl of thinned oil on the lower right, surmounted by a tornadolike form in pale umber, blue and green and tumbling blocks of yellow-green on a vermilion ground. A bird in flight emerges from a field of slate blue on the upper right, wings beating toward the picture plane. Other paintings, such as Heart Crown (2004), burst with roses and the crown's diamond shapes.

Joint, who also recently exhibited at Prince Street Gallery [see following review], presented four oils on panel and, like Brown, a number of impressive works on paper. The geometric abstraction of Joint's 55-by-20-inch Portrait from a Floating World (2004) recalls the more abstract landscapes of Tom Wesselmann, but oriented to the vertical.

At Naumann's suggestion, the two artists essayed a painting together. The Embrace consists of a field of Brown's gestural abstraction supported by Joint's uninflected, geometric ground of purest color. This painting of conjoined authorship is sufficiently successful in its own right. But more significantly, it draws attention to the affinity that each artist demonstrates for the formal interests of the other, which is most evident in the drawings and prints that ornament this timely and inventive show.