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Paul Brown at Nicole Klagsbrun - New York
Art in America, April, 2003 by Joe Fyfe
Paul Brown's recent paintings evoke memory by way of tactility, color and the metaphoric properties of palimpsest and excavation. The surfaces are built up, sanded and then recovered in layers of oil paint that has been mixed to a granular consistency, like plaster or thin cake icing. The paint crumbles as it reaches the edges of the canvases. Most of the paintings, all untitled, are around 2-by-3-foot horizontals covered with small holes, made with a nail or with the tip of an electric drill. These holes, which require close inspection, cover the surfaces of the works in an overall pattern. Brown adds dots to the surfaces in some works and attempts to keep both holes and dots approximately equidistant. They seem to have been evenly separated by his eye, without the aid of any measuring device.
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The holes are sometimes repainted with a new color or are left unpainted to reveal layers of subsurface. In many cases, Brown uses colors that evoke a faded childhood of Easter-egg dyes and baby blankets. In a work from 2002, an array of small dots includes pale turquoise, pea green, powdery indigo and several shades of delicate gray. Another work could be a section of pockmarked nursery wall, with a topcoat of dirty peach and painted off-white dots interspersed with drilled craters revealing layers of egg-yolk yellow and turquoise.
A painting from 2001 is mostly white and parched-looking--the color of bones long exposed to the sun. The pattern of drilled holes is left bare, allowing the faint exposure of a red grid that existed at an earlier moment in the work. An enlivening flicker of other buried colors spreads beneath the surface, but not enough to rid one of a sense of impoverishment, as if the life's blood of the painting has been baked dry or worn away.
There's something a little forlorn about these paintings that thwarts any simple expectation of experiencing their surfaces formally, but there is a deeper resonance in the work because of it. Brown's paintings are like milestones marking the distance traveled from the cradle to points far into adulthood. As such, they summon up a world of feeling more often found in the lyrical, fatalistic stories of Irish writers like Edna O'Brien and William Trevor than in the work of American painters. They also make a compelling case for Brown's continued exploration of this territory.
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