Deception is the image more than anything else.
The women moved easily around the patio and spacious backyard, holding drinks mildly amused at the oval stomachs draped in flowered cotton fabric. Their wedding rings reflected the pink twilight, their golden bracelets caught the light of the mustard hills. But outside the afternoon was lethal: No sunglasses could cut the glare, and even your pores shrank back against the light. - Eva Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company
There is no landscape, neither natural nor urban, in Brian Calvin’s painting and yet we instinctively grasp the lukewarm heat of the Californian sun with diffused light that dazzles the eye and flattens the mass. Faces of women, of an indefinable age, close-ups that cancel out the surrounding environment, portrayed poised between realism and comics in a constant polarization of humor and tragedy. Painting is always a mental thing, wrote Leonardo and, as history teaches us, the image—and above all painting—can never grasp the truth (Derrida): representation will always remain an unattainable ambition just like Balzac’s Frenhofer.
It is in this ineluctable truth that the ancestral question between abstraction and figuration stagnates, a binomial in which Calvin’s art of the present does not want to be imprisoned. In fact, if the preponderant presence of the body marked by clear lines and large fields of color is undeniable, the paradoxical and grotesque vein of the expressions, deliberately caricatural, together with the excess of decoratorism transport these paintings into an unreal dimension, into a cartoonish animated meta-language. It is certainly not the verisimilitude that interests the artist today, but rather the interpretation, with the mind’s eye and the exasperation of the imagination, of the stimuli that society gives us back.
Futile, bewildered, vaguely bored, the humanity Calvin presents us with is that of the TikTok generation approved by mirror-like glossy lips, clearly dominated by the excessive power of social media, the imperative of the selfie and the dictatorship of filters. Noses like trunks on flat skin tones, hallucinating pupils set in colored eye sockets with colorful make-up in geometric patterns and transversal gazes that betray a rampant schizophrenia are the distinctive features of the female models that populate his surreal anthropological panorama. Calvin chooses the noble and ancient genre of the portrait as the plot of the path which, as Enrico Castelnuovo writes in his famous essay on portraiture, concentrates the maximum attention on the eyes, abnormally wide open. It is no coincidence that the “punctum” of Calvin’s painting, to quote Roland Barthes, is the eye, mirror of the soul and threshold of knowledge. A surreal and surrealist eye, an aesthetic and cognitive device that doubles, breaks down and superimposes (following cubist tradition) in an attempt to frame movement, to understand the three dimensions by escaping the static nature of the canvas and the reality of representation.
Source: Almine Rech press release
Deception is the image more than anything else.
The women moved easily around the patio and spacious backyard, holding drinks mildly amused at the oval stomachs draped in flowered cotton fabric. Their wedding rings reflected the pink twilight, their golden bracelets caught the light of the mustard hills. But outside the afternoon was lethal: No sunglasses could cut the glare, and even your pores shrank back against the light. - Eva Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company
There is no landscape, neither natural nor urban, in Brian Calvin’s painting and yet we instinctively grasp the lukewarm heat of the Californian sun with diffused light that dazzles the eye and flattens the mass. Faces of women, of an indefinable age, close-ups that cancel out the surrounding environment, portrayed poised between realism and comics in a constant polarization of humor and tragedy. Painting is always a mental thing, wrote Leonardo and, as history teaches us, the image—and above all painting—can never grasp the truth (Derrida): representation will always remain an unattainable ambition just like Balzac’s Frenhofer.
It is in this ineluctable truth that the ancestral question between abstraction and figuration stagnates, a binomial in which Calvin’s art of the present does not want to be imprisoned. In fact, if the preponderant presence of the body marked by clear lines and large fields of color is undeniable, the paradoxical and grotesque vein of the expressions, deliberately caricatural, together with the excess of decoratorism transport these paintings into an unreal dimension, into a cartoonish animated meta-language. It is certainly not the verisimilitude that interests the artist today, but rather the interpretation, with the mind’s eye and the exasperation of the imagination, of the stimuli that society gives us back.
Futile, bewildered, vaguely bored, the humanity Calvin presents us with is that of the TikTok generation approved by mirror-like glossy lips, clearly dominated by the excessive power of social media, the imperative of the selfie and the dictatorship of filters. Noses like trunks on flat skin tones, hallucinating pupils set in colored eye sockets with colorful make-up in geometric patterns and transversal gazes that betray a rampant schizophrenia are the distinctive features of the female models that populate his surreal anthropological panorama. Calvin chooses the noble and ancient genre of the portrait as the plot of the path which, as Enrico Castelnuovo writes in his famous essay on portraiture, concentrates the maximum attention on the eyes, abnormally wide open. It is no coincidence that the “punctum” of Calvin’s painting, to quote Roland Barthes, is the eye, mirror of the soul and threshold of knowledge. A surreal and surrealist eye, an aesthetic and cognitive device that doubles, breaks down and superimposes (following cubist tradition) in an attempt to frame movement, to understand the three dimensions by escaping the static nature of the canvas and the reality of representation.
Source: Almine Rech press release
