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

Stuart Morgan

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

"What happens to a poetic utterance when the rhetoric, the basis of understanding, is broken?" asked Christopher Le Brun in an interview in Artforum in December 1982. Reconstructing a painterly rhetoric-that total armature without which belief in a fiction proves impossible-requires a ratio of disjunction, a disregard for principles of correctness. Based on the recognition of loss, it is an exercise in discipline, the recovering of enabling conventions and the summons to eloquence itself. Without rhetoric, defininitionsof the process of creation itself founder; distinctions between beginnings and ends, between the relevant aspects of an artwork, prove false. To begin restoring rhetoric anew-by careful arrangement of its figures or by temporarily grasping a power neither completely outside, nor totally inherent in the object before you-needs hubris sufficient to disregard training and memory. Paradoxically, it requires a resistance to rhetoric itself.

Le Brun's recent paintings are neither repetitions of what has gone before nor a change of direction. Given the complexity and the tragic, perhaps quixotic, nature of the entire enterprise, neither possibility would be likely. Instead they deepen the terms of the enquiry and raise the stakes. Take a single device. Roughly circular, frequently curtailed it is the ancestor of the shield and the millstone that Le Brun once used, both allusions to threadbare pictorial bric-a-brac. In Union, 1984, the head of a white horse, located at the midpoint of a large rectangular canvas, is challenged from the left by a complete circle of black and from the right by a complete circle of white. The white circle demonstrates just how contradictory Le Brun can choose to be. Dragged over the dry impasto, the white paint is applied with huge, rough, concentric gestures, then whiter thrusts give it a stippled centre, and then finally some strokes of gray are added: these last are dummy passes which could lend an impression of volume; however, when applied to the wet paint beneath , they deny its feasibility as anything but a fictional construct. Similarly, Passage 1984-85, painted chiefly in two shades of gray, frames the same disc shape which, like a partial view of the moon, is obscured slightly by a mesh of marks on the right. The paint seems stretched across other layers of other paint, like a skin which obliterates previous marks yet itself is liable to be altered; on its surface are pencilled graffiti posing as remains of an abandoned plan but which suggest the possibility of a fresh start.:Fresh" is hardly the the word. Where Le Brun once opened perspectival tunnels into his pictures, these blank counters, neither flat nor volumetric, serve to obscure depths which are hinted at, nor perceived fully. Vast pentimenti, they exist as marks in their own right and as cancellations of other marks below.

A parallel speculation arises on the similarly contradictory subject of shadows, which assume an importance equal to their sources or are cast on what would otherwise be read as a plain coloured background, as if it were a wall. Most strikingly, in Untitled, 1980-85, the outline of a drummer walking straight toward the viewer is yellow, as if behind the figure were a light so powerful that it threw him into darkness. If a corollary question is how space is created in painting, answers are also contradictory. In one work, a figure is seen striding out of a chaos of pigment; in another, Victory, 1985, dripped paint at the bottom of the picture reveals the depth of impasto. Both treatments signify free space. Both propose ways in which the image is generated.

Five-finger exercises, perhaps, but they are pursued with such rigour that no certainties remain. Freedom and occupation, substance and shadow, statement and cancellation, are indistinguishable. What is new is the feeling of dogged disbelief, the ritual clearing of the mind that any Zen master might recognise, before structure, motif, content all enter. The point at which they emerge as what Le Brun calls "utterance" is the most chimeric. For him, painting is already defined and gives birth to itself. So firm an insistence on the contradictions inherent in paint is preparation for convention itself. (Definition, after all, means the plotting of deficiencies.) Relying on his own intuition of a law equivalent to Clement Greenberg's :dialectical conversion". he perversely high lights inconsistency in order to achieve decorum. It is harder to remove definitions than to make them. Heroically-perhaps quixotically-Le Brun continues; achieving most when he fails most grandly; when after all his utterance, his outering, he generates a frisson that is all that remains of a lost structure of belief.