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
Norbert Messler
Review of the exhibition at Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne. Artscribe International 1988.
In his oil paintings, Christopher Le Brun presents a painterly reaction to the current geometrical tendencies of contemporary painting. The unifying element in many of them is the tree, both alone and in groups. As a landscape theme, painted in a muted and symbolic way, it is a leitmotif. The painting style itself, using fairly spacious strokes, and reticent, almost impersonal, does not primarily seek the recognisability or concreteness of the tree or trees. As Stefan Schmidt-Wulffen has pointed out, the trees are unambiguously "the words of a language with which Le Brun treats painting as a form of thought".
Le Brun's paintings are - in a positive sense, and not as illustrations - literary paintings. After the manner of the writer Peter Weiss in his prose piece "Der Schatten des Korpers des Kutschers (The shadow of the Body of the Coachman 1960)", where the objects and people are recorded merely as shadows of themselves in an objectified external world, Le Brun cannot paint the trees without inventing an original way of considering paintings. They are actually rhetorical pictorial figures, to be interpreted tautologically. Behind each painting there is another painting. Within every painted tree there is a dual statement, as there is in the shadow of the coachman's body; behind each tree is concealed its double, its echo, its shadow. Clarity of intent remains somewhere outside. Things are either not what they claim to be, or are both what they claim to be and something else as well. Le Brun's pictorial structure is accordingly blurred or perspectivally assembled from at least two levels. It seems more important to him than well-executed paintings. In places the effect is lethargic and matt. But the composition and the application complement one another: with clarity and simplicity on one level, vagueness and ambiguity on the other.
Through the atmospherically dense effect of the colour on the one hand and through the chalky pallor on the other, Le Brun's composition and application are intensified to a Turner-like Romanticism, or they may quote the inspiration of Blake. Le Brun's painterly vision, an effective mixture of impressionistic and colour-field techniques, seizes our gaze with a skilfully composed pictorial mirage which, like a true mirage, presents elevated, transposed, altered or imagined images of objects. Images of objects come and go, vanish from the senses, return. The canvas opens up and blocks one's view. What remains is a sublimated image in the mind, an image of "the shadow of the body of the tree".
