Figure and Play
Albertz Benda, New York
4 May - 13 June 2020, extended to 10 July
Wellspring, the text accompanying this exhibition was written by Matthew Hargraves, Chief Curator of Art Collections and Head of Art Collections and Information and Access, Yale Center for British Art. Extracts can be found on this page, and the whole essay is in the catalogue which can be downloaded below.
Figure and Play, 2020 oil on canvas diptych, 160.4 x 280.5 cm
Stay (2019), began as two paintings side by side before being separated and worked up as independent canvases. Only much later was their affinity rediscovered and the two reunited, this time one above the other, and then finished in relationship. An upper canvas of fiery yellow now finds its partner in a contrasting and richly impasted one of blues, violets, and mauves but with the same yellow breaking through to call out to the canvas above. Thus the relationships in the doubles and the diptychs is as much accidental as designed, based on intuition and guided by sensory experience, more than conceptual logic or formal planning.
Stay, 2020 oil on canvas diptych, 181 x 180.4 cm
Cloud, Castle, Lake, 2020 oil on canvas, 170.2 x 221.7 cm
A painting such as Cloud, Castle, Lake (2020), presents a duality based on the opposition between warm and cold hues that results nevertheless in a great symphony of colour. A powerful yellow note runs horizontally across the bottom of the canvas, underpinning a central chord of cool azure and turquoise that reverberates at the centre, bounded by a great peach frame with orange and scarlet accents. Like the doubles and diptychs, Cloud, Castle, Lake explores the possibilities of harmony and dissonance and similarly composes itself into upper and lower zones.
There is in Le Brun a profound sense of the ability to hold simultaneously what would conventionally be opposing forces in mutual esteem and of the creative possibilities of that opposition. This is fundamental to the doubles and diptychs.
Aside IV, 2020 oil on canvas diptych, 90.3 x 200.3 cm
Aside IV (2020), has a left panel with a rich putty colour, an addition to Le Brun’s palette in the last five or so years. The colour is highly receptive to light and shifts itself according to prevailing illumination like respiration in a living creature. The entire surface of this canvas has been worked through a combination of scraping and blending. By contrast the right panel has a ground of tough dark red over which has been drawn an intense jolt of turquoise. The combination of the reposeful left-hand panel and the bold right-hand panel with its turquoise burst of coloratura invite the eye to rove back and forth between the two, exploring ever deeper the nuances within the two canvases. Both elements exist independently, retaining their autonomy despite the fact that a new work has been created out of their pairing.
Declaim and Redoubt, 2020 oil on canvas diptych, 160.4 x 280.4 cm
Wait, 2020 oil on canvas diptych, 180.8 x 180.5 cm
Paint is applied, scraped down, layered, worked with the brush, blended, and sometimes applied straight out of the tube to create a combination of marks, strokes and veils that obscure and reveal colours and forms. The process of pairing and arranging the first oil paintings on paper in late 2017 is indicative of Le Brun’s process. All subsequent doubles and diptychs on canvas have developed intuitively after the pattern of their inception, canvases finding their companions sometimes by accident and sometimes by a process of seeming to call out for a specific counterpart.
Stream, 2020 oil on canvas, 170 x 240.3 cm
Pale Umber, 2020 oil on canvas diptych, 150.6 x 140.3 cm
Aside V, 2020 oil on canvas diptych, 90.3 x 200.2 cm
In Aside V (2020), the eye is drawn first to the left panel with an intense scarlet burst at its centre. Then it is moves across to the right where a pewter colour has been applied straight from the tube over a solid charcoal ground, a completely contrasting palette and process of facture. Yet in each panel the eye passes back and forth from side to side being invited to see ever greater complexity in each with every pass, to peer through the layers, to perceive depths and beauties that were not noticed before and look deep into the wellsprings of Le Brun’s imagination. And the result is always enthralling beauty.
Untitled 14.9, 2019 oil on canvas 140 x 130.7 cm
The English ‘soul’ is psyche in Greek and anima in Latin and it is the simultaneously unnerving and exhilarating impression that we are encountering something that is animate when contemplating the diptychs and doubles that gives them their peculiar power. It is a mysterious, poetic effect that points towards some primitive system pervading the entire created world. Le Brun’s art is attuned in some fundamental way to that ultimate wellspring, participating as a part within the grand whole of the universe, expressed nowhere better than in a favourite poet of the artist, Wallace Stevens:
The central poem is the poem of the whole,
The poem of the composition of the whole,
The composition of blue sea and of green,
Of blue light and of green, as lesser poems,
And the miraculous multiplex of lesser poems,
Not merely into a whole, but a poem of
The whole, the essential compact of the parts,
The roundness that pulls tight the final ring
Wallace Stevens, A Primitive Like an Orb, VII
Figure and Play
exhibition catalogue
Albertz Benda, 2020
Essay by Matthew Hargraves
Click here to view the complete publication
albertz benda, 515 W 26th Street, NY 10001 +1 212 244 2579 albertzbenda.com
Catalogue essay copyright Matthew Hargraves, Chief Curator of Art Collections and Head of Art Collections and Information and Access, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
Images copyright Christopher Le Brun, DACS 2020