Bryan Robertson
Catalogue Introduction to the exhibition Christopher Le Brun Paintings 1991-1994 at Marlborough Fine Art London 1994.

Bryan Robertson and Christopher Le Brun
Interview. Lindos, Rhodes. April 1997 and January 1998.

Caroline Collier
Exhibition review. Christopher Le Brun at Nigel Greenwood, London. Flash Art no.124 October/November 1985

Charles Saumarez Smith. Christopher Le Brun
Introduction to the monograph Christopher Le Brun Booth-Clibborn Editions 2001

Christopher Le Brun and Cecilia Powell
Constructive, Investigative and Truthful. Christopher Le Brun interviewed by Cecilia Powell on J.M.W. Turner and Watercolour. Published in the Turner Society News August 2006.

Christopher Le Brun. Giorgio Morandi
This essay was published in the catalogue for the exhibition 'Giorgio Morandi Etchings' at the Tate Gallery in 1992.

Christopher Le Brun. Representation
Paper delivered to the Royal Academy Forum. Published by Architectural Review November 2004

Donald Kuspit
Exhibition review. Christopher Le Brun at Sperone Westwater, New York. " ..the Watteau of the new expressionism..." Art Forum vol.XXVII, no.1, September 1988, p.136

Ebbsfleet Landmark
Artist statement and description of the proposal for a 50 metre high sculpture.

Eileen Myles.
Exhibition review. Christopher Le Brun at Sperone Westwater. Art in America, December 1988, p.154

John Aiken. Paradox and Modernity
Written for issue no.4 of the Slade Magazine c.1999. John Aiken is the Slade Professor.

Jonathan Glancey. A Chip off the Old Block
Jonathan Glancey on how a sculpture by Christopher Le Brun became the template for the office of the future. Published in The Guardian, 8th March 2004

Mario Cutajar. Fade into Darkness
Christopher Le Brun at the Art Center College of Design and L.A. Louver Gallery. Review. Artsweek March 1993.

Mark Francis. Interview with Christopher Le Brun
Fig-1, 50 projects in 50 weeks. 2000

Norbert Messler
Review of the exhibition at Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne. Artscribe International 1988.

Patrick Elliott. Four Riders
From Contemporary British Art in Print. Booth-Clibborn Editions 1995

Patrick Elliott. Seven Lithographs
From Contemporary British Art in Print Booth-Clibborn Editions 1995

Patrick Elliott. The Wagner Prints
From Contemporary British Art in Print. Booth-Clibborn Editions 1995

Stuart Morgan
Exhibition review. Christopher Le Brun at the Nigel Greenwood Gallery. Art Forum November 1985.

Tony Godfrey. Finding the Figure in the Landscape
Christopher Le Brun and his recent work. Catalogue essay . Arnolfini Gallery 1984

Mario Cutajar. Fade into Darkness

Christopher Le Brun at the Art Center College of Design and L.A. Louver Gallery. Review. Artsweek March 1993.

The melancholic gaze is a backward-looking gaze cognizant to an exquisite degree of the inexorable passing of time and the way its passage dooms the most intense passions and the most vivid sensations to a memory that recedes perpetually as we are carried downstream by the river of life. At the heart of melancholy then, is the experience of time as pure recession, as never-ending loss. And yet, what dooms experience to the realm of memory is what may transmute it into something sublime. To court loss in order to memorialize what is lost- that would appear to be an essential factor in the psychology of any artist who pursues the sublime. The partisan of Art, the esthete, is of necessity also a partisan of melancholy.

Part of the melancholic quality of Englishman Christopher Le Brun’s paintings, currently in the inaugural show at the Alyce De Roulet Williamson Gallery at the Art Center of Design and in a smaller show at L.A. Louver, is ascribable to the dusky light which suffuses many of them. Dusk, the hour that marks the day’s impending extinction, drains objects of their color and leaves them ashen, cold and distant. In Le Brun’s grandest paintings the light is almost entirely absent. In these vast, tenebrous images – Tristan (1988), Aram Nemus Vult (1988-89) and The Briar Wood (1990) – Le Brun achieves a majestic congruence between image and process. As he reveals in an interview published in the catalogue that accompanies the Art Center exhibition and as is readily apparant from an inspection of the work itself, the final image, in each case is built upon the stratified ruins of countless others and the darkness that fills these paintings thus evokes both the burial (loss) of the overpainted layers and the depth of meaning which is thereby incorporated into the final image. In other words it is a darkness both additive – the materialization of the chain of associations that constitutes remembrance – and at the same time symbolic of oblivion. A uniqueness of painting lies in its ability to physically manifest depth while simultaneously creating the illusion of it and Le Brun's greatness as a painter, in my eyes, is demonstrated by his wonderful ability to exploit this quality.

Any argument about whether Le Brun is a figurative or an abstract painter can, in my opinion, be resolved by recognizing him as a Symbolist in the Mallarmian sense. He intimates as much of himself when he says that “associativeness is the engine of paintings effect upon us” and when he refers to the conceptual basis of his paintings as “an image for its own sake in a mysterious relationship to time and meaning, just its splendid, complex musicality of form.” The Monet of the Water Lilies, which Tristan invokes, is a Symbolist, as is the Debussy whose music murmured in my head as I stood before these paintings. Another painting, Marine, seems to be an almost explicit reference to Debussy’s La Mer, although it also recalls Emil Noldes harsh seascapes; but Le Brun’s Symbolist orientation sensitizes the viewer to the importance of sound in his choice of titles. I think Kay Larson, whose otherwise incisive “An Apologia for Abstract Painting” is included in the catalogue, goes astray when she reads Tristan as a reference to Wagnerian opera and is led by it to discover an allusion to the dark side of German history. If one listens with one’s ears what one will hear in the word Tristan is an echo of triste which jibes particularly well with the painting’s melancholy beauty.

The significance of Le Brun’s rediscovery and recovery of Symbolism is manifold. For one thing, it corrects abstraction’s forced divorce from meaning and does so without burdening it with the vulgarity that currently passes for “content.” In the role, Symbolism may prove, at the end of our century, to be as fruitful a direction for painting to take as it was at the end of the last century. Beyond that, there also is a suggestion in Le Brun’s work that modern art, which was initiated by Symbolism, has completed a cycle and is in the process of regenerating itself. And here it is worth recalling that Symbolism originated in reaction to a joyless Naturalism. Would it be too farfetched to suggest that Postmodernism, with its denial of interiority, its preoccupation with the most trashy and banal aspects of culture and its reliance on pseudo-scientific, sociological theorizing, is a mutated form of Naturalism? If so, it may prove to be the manure on which beautiful, new flowers will grow.