It is with an eye toward reduction, scale, and color that Brennan has created these smaller, monochromatic pieces for MINUS SPACE, a gallery known for its attention to reductive, concept-based, site-specific art. Brennan moved to Gowanus seven years prior, and these paintings reflect the shift in his environment and his heady fascination with adaptive, first-strike deliberations of form and color.

Brennan has always been invested in economy over minimalism. “I am interested in drawing down to the bone, and my paintings at this point are literally made with two coats of paint, black and white,” he says. In an interview with MINUS SPACE, Brennan describes why he has veered toward monochrome. “I had to address questions of how far I wanted to go with color, and architectural forms. I really just wanted to put all of that aside and embrace some of the simpler qualities that had defined my works on paper already. It was a sorting out process that took some time.” He wanted to embrace a simpler process and to absorb new qualities into his work as a way of interacting with this new landscape. What emerged in this simplification was letting go of color in favor of honing subliminal imagery and creating an altar of sorts for contrasting values.

His razor paintings, however, are deceptively monochromatic: he has worked in a variety of greys, whites, and blacks, some of which are quietly tinted with other hues. As we’ve seen in his double-horizon paintings, color is critical to Brennan, and his paintings pay tribute not only to contemporary painting but also to historical print and film-making. Walter Bernstein, says the artist, would go to the movies, yet find himself disappointed as more and more came out in color. These seemed “paradoxically pallid” next to the black-and-white versions. “In fact,” said Bernstein, “they had no shadows. Color had diminished them; they had lost the quality of dream.” Brennan’s paintings gain this quality of lucid dreaming: the fact that they are nearly monochromatic does not lessen their impact. Brennan seeks to go simpler, more reductive, quieter. He is paying attention. He is reducing things to forms that allow the brain to settle, to sink, to mire itself in new textures that the viewers feel at their cores.

Apart from color, scale is another crucial element of Brennan’s work. The decision to go smaller was inspired, in part, by Myron Stout. He thinks about hands and face, parts of the body on a scale to which we are attuned. Stout’s work was typically 24 x 36”. Brennan’s paintings are 20 x 16 inches and 12 x 19 inches, yet, like Stout’s pieces, they have the feel of telescoped monstrosities, a kind of mountain-presence whose heft is large and deep. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what the scale of our time might be,” says Brennan. “We live in an era where an enormous amount of information is concentrated on small objects like smart phones or tablets.” What he found was that going smaller enabled him to reach a better object/painting correlation comparable to a flat screen TV or the “tricked-out tech things we are all surrounded by.” Another consideration was that many images of paintings are seen and shared online, which means the sense of scale is the first thing to go.

The writer Charles Baxter has often talked about how silence and stillness can act as intensifiers in fiction. Baxter posits that silence strengthens whatever stands on either side of it. It takes on a different emotion, a different color, for whatever it flows through or between. Brennan’s paintings can be examined along the same vein. How does this reductive stillness intensify the surrounding space, the borders, and the color? What does American culture, gadget-obsessed and screen-staring, accustomed to low-grade heroics, do when confronted with these colossal plays on scale and color? Can we look at the paintings like they are smart phone screens, altars, or butcher shops visited on night walks?

One of Brennan’s greatest qualities is his deep attention to reduction and abstraction, to pinching out aspects of scale and beauty in these variations. “I think most people think of abstraction as something striving to be apart from the world, like geometry, but nothing is entirely apart from the world. Euclid was of this world, and I often think of my own abstract painting as earthy.” Keep an eye out for what this incredible mid-career painter comes up with next, and for MINUS SPACE’s upcoming shows (next up: Michael Rouillard and Roberta Allen) as the gallery continues to grow and expand.

Maria Anderson was also able to contact Michael Brennan, engaging him in conversation about his recent work and the inspiration that fuels his creative process.

Michael Brennan, Poem Card For Noor Al-Fayez, 2013, Oil and wax on canvas, 12 x 9 in. Image courtesy of Minus Space.

Maria Anderson: You talk about abstract painting as a form of never-ending adjustment.  Can you talk more about what you mean exactly by adjustment? Is it mental, spiritual, environmental (i.e. becoming accustomed to and absorbing, in some sense, your neighborhood?)
Michael Brennan: I think “never-ending adjustment” stems from a kind of attitude adjustment—when one is working deeply with materials those materials are always revealing unknown properties, ones that an artist might want to exploit, or for a time even ignore, but alternate pathways always appear at every stage of the investigation. Even the most rigid artists often are seduced by the question “What if I tried…?” which may or may not lead them to their imagined goal. There’s just such an infinite amount of variables to painting. Even if I were to dogmatically insist, “I will now only ever paint black paintings” an artist could still spend a lifetime deciding between a chromatic black, a coarse carbon black, a copper derived black, etc. Each choice is substantially different and could potentially alter the content of the work. The paradox of working minimally is that every decision (assuming there are fewer) becomes paramount. And this of course is just the crude part, the material level. I believe, as many artists do, that everything we absorb has some residual effect. We may try to cling to some kind of cultural moment, but nothing is static.

MA: I love what you said in a Visual Discrepancies interview about lesser heroes: 

‘I walk around Brooklyn a lot, and sometimes I imagine the people I encounter are the lesser heroes of another epic, that they are the same type I’ve already discovered in Homer. I figure that in this age of avatars, compromised, and de-professionalized super-heroes that this is somehow appropriate, and that kind of thinking gives me fuel for images and titles.’

Can you say more about this? Is modern man some kind of low-grade (not in a bad way) hero? I feel this way walking around Brooklyn as well, that there is something mythical about the struggle and the gargantuan effort people put forth to pay rent, be successful, and enjoy themselves doing it.
MB: This may be very old fashioned of me, perhaps too romantic, but I think that artists are meant to poetize their environment, to mythologize the mundane. I don’t live in the south of France, so I can’t realistically paint like Matisse. I spend a lot of time walking around Myrtle Ave., Third Ave., and think “What can I do with this?” because this is what I have to work with. What can my imagination do with this? I want my work, abstract as it is, to be of my own time and place, to reflect the conditions that can and do only exist now, and that means paying attention to the world around me. I think the local is generally undervalued.

MA: You also mention Philip Roth. As a fiction writer, I’d be interested to know whether you have any other literary influences, or if any played a part in your mindset when you were creating these paintings.
MB: I’m very bookish. I have fantasies about teaching American Literature (Hawthorne, Melville, Poe), I worked in publishing for a time, and have worked in many bookstores over the years. I have eighth-grade English teacher taste in books. I’m currently re-reading The Centaur by John Updike mostly because I’m interested in how he localizes mythic content. He does so in a much less grand way than Joyce with Ulysses, but that clearly was the precedent. Basically all the townie figures are gods and goddesses and Alton (“All Town” or Reading, PA) becomes the scene of a minor epic, but an epic nonetheless. I guess I use literature as parallel inspiration. It’s never a direct link. I question the use of language, the examination of culture. Maybe this will help me make better minimal paintings of mythic standing that somehow still connect to Myrtle Ave.? That’s a desire of mine anyway. I learned a few things from this forgotten Updike book.

By Maria Anderson

The post Maria Anderson In Conversation with Michael Brennan appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Candice Strongwater, Rainwater, 2013, Mixed media on canvas, 4×4 inches

Featuring: Lee Arnold, Michael Brennan, Ai Campbell,  Bill Carroll, Nicole Cohen, Dana Crossan, Jennifer Dwyer, Shingo Francis, Veronique Gambier, Joy Garnett, Daniel Hill, Loie Hollowell, Arlan Huang, Rhia Hurt, Will Hutnick, Rachel Kohn, Suzy Kopf, Natalie Lomeli, Allison Maletz, John F. Moore, Janet Pedersen, Simona Prives, Rachna Rajen, Judy Rifka, Jean Rim, Esther Ruiz, Mary Schiliro, Rachel Sharp,  Marcy Sperry, Vincent Stracquadanio,  Candice Strongwater,  Jannell Turner, James Vanderberg, Jia Wei,  Rachael Whitney, Jeanne Wilkinson, Rose Wong, Heidi Yockey

Trestle Gallery: Winter Art Sale
November 22, 2013, From 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
168 7th Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn
trestlegallery.org

The post Trestle Winter Art Sale appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Michael Brennan, Athena Behind Achilles, 2012. Oil and wax on canvas, 20 x 16 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Jason Stopa: One of the most striking aspects in these new works is the kind of back-lit illusionism that is present in the handling of the paint. It reminds me of Pollock in that Hans Namuth film, where he is painting on screen to create a certain liquidity. Your work references paintings’ reproduction via the internet, and yet simultaneously declares itself as an active agent that can only be experienced in person. Are your paintings’ liquidity, their present-ness, important factors in how people interact with these?
Michael Brennan: In the Namuth film you see Pollock painting through a sheet of glass, arranging bits of mesh and other materials within the black enamel. It’s very revealing. Sadly afterwards, Pollock felt as though he had given up his secrets, lost his mojo. He went inside, downed an entire bottle, then flipped over the Thanksgiving table—according to legend. I think good painting leads a viewer through the process of its own creation from beginning to end. The act of revealing is what animates any painting.
I originally began this series with ink on paper. I was drawn to the unruliness of ink. Unlike most abstract painters, I don’t mind having any allusions to imagery. The 20 x 16 in format I favor is a constant, a standard.
I work quickly with the knife and when I feel that I’m recognizing something, when I feel like there’s something there, that’s when I stop. I don’t want it to be a hidden image, more of a flash of something. When I ask my son what he sees he says, “Batman.”

MB: Flint, what do you see in this painting?

Flint Brennan: I don’t know. I see a ring at the bottom.

MB: We’ve been reading The Hobbit and are about to start The Lord of The Rings. All Laugh.

JS: I like that the new work has titles that reference some loaded topics – The Iliad, Brooklyn, Batman, Wu Tang. All of these have characters or characterize a situation that is down and out. Can you talk about this?
MB: In every bad neighborhood you’ll always find a comic book store. Comics are a way of escaping and transforming the shabbiness of everyday urban life; the Wu-Tang recreated Staten Island as Shaolin and that’s perfectly acceptable. I’m interested in the minor characters of the Iliad, not the heroes, but the warriors who get gorily wasted page after page. Like Homer, I want to restore their humanity, I want to level and localize the Iliad. I like the Fitzgerald translation, its one-two rhythm reminds me of hip hop – stripped down, punchy. Artists constantly borrow from these narratives; Virgil borrowed from Homer to meet the needs of Augustan Rome. I want to borrow from Homer to suit the needs of contemporary Brooklyn, which seems entirely appropriate to me in this age of avatars. I’m interested in making a heroic anti-hero painting. I just watched the movie Kick-Ass, and I would say the world of comics has moved past the cynicism of say the Dark Knight or the Watchmen, and we’ve entered a new age where heroes are being leveled and de-professionalized.

My early work was more aligned with geometric abstraction. And I left it to flirt with a kind of quasi-pictorialism – a big no-no in abstraction.

JS: Yes, but there is still the bottom edge, which…
MB: Which references ideas about abstraction that go back to the Carter administration. [laughter]

MB: But, I don’t like dogmatic abstraction, I’m sick of it.

JS: Let’s talk about that black. It has a matte quality to it that’s pretty grainy and filmic up close.
MB: It’s a gritty, slate black, something like ground up chalkboard. I was using mostly cold blacks until the painter Nat Meade suggested I try slate black, which is warmer and has a larger particulate. For me it was a game changer, a significant shift. My work is often compared to David Reed, William Wood, and Mark Sheinkman’s. My work is not so Rococo, less finessed; rougher and uglier, neither so grand nor pretty. Although I like allusions to photography and printmaking, their work has a photographically retouched quality that I’m not so interested in for myself.

JS: Lasker’s new works have a bit of this quality. A little too clean. I recently saw his early work, which I found very interesting.
MB: That’s right, he recently had a show up of his very early work. Those early paintings are so wonderfully post-modern in a late 70’s New Wave faux-retro, mid-century modern, boomerang end-table kind of way. I remember seeing Lasker’s work in 90 or 91 at Sperone and thinking that those paintings felt so strongly of their own time —that he understood his own moment so correctly. I bet it was like seeing Warhol in 1960. They were so forceful and new.
JS: What about the scale of these works. It looks there are several of this smaller size. Are they all small paintings?
MB: I think it’s fine for paintings to be colossal when size is germane to their content, as is the case with Barnett Newman, but a lot of big painting is really just inflated. Also, we no longer live in the age of Cinerama, we live in the age of the iphone and the ipad—smarter, smaller. Screens and paintings nowadays engage viewers face-to-face rather than body-to-body. There’s also a difference between size and scale. Scale is about a proportional relationship. You can have a large-scale small painting and a small-scale large painting. Across the art world “large scale” is erroneously used to just mean big, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s just a pet peeve of mine. I think about scale a lot.

JS: I’ve thought about this in relation to my own work. That in order to keep painting, one must really believe in the efficacy of painting.
MB: There will never be a last painting. Painting can too easily accommodate the ideas of any era. Matthew Ritchie converted the conceptual armature of Matthew Barney’s work into a model for painting in the 90’s; something like Tiepolo where everything is flying around and any available surface can be painted upon. Maybe one can’t easily afford to make a feature film that accurately reflects our age, but one can always make a painting.

We are moving beyond a cynical approach to painting and art in general. One positive thing I’ll say about the New Casualists is that I like the sincerity of their intentional oafishness. Laughs

We’ve moved on from the high, sophisticated irony of Jasper Johns to the now lowest possible irony of the Wild Whites of West Virginia – we’re left with nowhere else to go.

JS: It’s so true. Where are these works headed next?
MB: I’m showing in Mexico City soon at Fifi Projects. Of course, this is such a Brooklyn based project that I’d like to show it here too, be it at Minus Space or someday The Brooklyn Museum. I like the idea of showing locally, which is part and parcel of the work.

The post In Conversation: Jason Stopa Interviews Michael Brennan appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.