Alex Brown

SQUARE PUSHER

Alex Brown�s paintings update the great tradition of landscapes and portraits, nudes, seascapes, interiors, and still lifes. He works from found photographs�generally quiet and lacking in any obvious emotional impact�taken from such things as postcards, travel brochures, press cuttings, album covers, and the Internet, and his initial attraction to an image often has to do with some small area of color. In paintings from the mid-�90s, Brown imposed a series of transformations on this material, initially turning to computer graphics programs in his preparatory work to break the images up into pixels. These pixels, which both defined and abstracted the original picture, evolved over time from squares to overlapping circles and interlocking tile patterns, finally breaking free of the Op-art-like grid entirely to become free form shapes.

In his more recent work, Brown has been making frequent use of a second image, which has been reduced to a line drawing, to fracture the first. These double exposures filter each other, with the first layer creating a kaleidoscopic effect, and the second shimmering through it. Through this process, each image exposes and informs the other. International Slackness (its title suggesting both a holiday-like relaxation and a universal clich�) is a seaside landscape seen through a drawing of buildings. The buildings appear definitely waterlogged, as if inundated by the ocean, while the ocean seems to be occupied by the buildings. The playful dialogue between the appearances and disappearances of the entities creates a hiatus in which meaning may be suspended and experience may be apprehended.

These recent paintings, like BLS and Supermix, also function as modern equivalents to the anamorphoses�unrecognizably distorted images�hidden in the paintings of early masters like Leonardo Da Vinci. Although Brown returns from time to time to the pixilation of his earlier work, the patterns in the paintings here are more often intuitive than geometric. The images that appear out of what appears to be their disorganized forms are more like apparitions than appearances�phantasmagoria emerging from the surface of the painting. In this way, Brown�s work maintains its link with photography: The image is revealed slowly, as in the developing of a photographic print. Here, however, it is often the titles that play the part of the developer, providing a key to unpacking the images.

Brown deliberately distances himself from his sources. Working from pre-existing images�pictures that are �already out� as Richard Prince once said�is a way for Brown to leave the largest possible part of himself outside the painting. This distancing is accentuated by Brown�s working method: Diorama, a pixilated image that refers back to earlier paintings, is a blown-out, low-resolution digital file pulled off the Web, and the title suggests that the landscape depicted might itself be only an approximation of reality. In a sense, this is also the case for Alice, a portrait of Alice Coltrane. Here, the underlying grid is similar to a zenithal projection, like those used to map the Earth in which the projection plane is tangent to the Earth�s pole. The title recalls Alice in Wonderland�s extraordinary trip though the flat plane of the looking glass and into another world.

Like Georges Seurat in his day, Brown seems fascinated by the mechanics of perception, and incorporating this into his work. Looking back over twentieth-century art, and particularly to Pop art�s fascination with cheap mechanical reproduction, Seurat emerges retrospectively as a progenitor of the anti-romantic art of the Sixties. This is Seurat�s secret glory, because historically his influence has never been clearly defined. Yet Seurat�s relationship with technology is understood to have had an essential impact on our own perception of the world. Brown is obviously not a Postimpressionist, but all the same there is an underlying filiation to Seurat in the way he breaks down images and reconstructs them as areas of light and color.

Brown�s paintings never completely divulge their secrets the first time we see them. In Alice, the subject only comes into focus as the viewer moves away; as one approaches the painting, she disappears. In those works where one image nearly supplants another, the painting becomes almost abstract. In all of Brown�s work, the subject always seems more or less camouflaged. Perhaps he is expressing a distrust of an image�s ability to tell the whole truth, or an interest in an image�s ability to tell more than one truth.

�Vincent P�coil