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

Tony Godfrey. Finding the Figure in the Landscape

Christopher Le Brun and his recent work. Catalogue essay . Arnolfini Gallery 1984

How symptomatic that when commissioned to design the set for the Royal Ballet’s revival of Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial Christopher Le Brun should paint a backdrop with a triumphal arch against an evening sky, and line the sides with banners as though from a memorial chapel. These are motifs that are at once celebratory and commemorative, just as Balanchine’s elegy is for the classical dancing tradition of St. Petersburg. Predictably the arch-conservative ballet audience of London disliked the ambiguity of the staging, their expectations of glossy flim-flam remaining unfulfilled.

Like his paintings his stage setting had an ambiguous attitude to time, as though it was both of now and not of now. Behind such ambiguity, or rather ambivalence, of time and intention lies a complex drive for images of unification, completion or integration. Despite the immediacy of his imagery and his evocative use of colour it remains curiously difficult to pin down why we should find in his paintings such a mixture of satisfaction and provocation.

So much depends on his motifs; the arch, the banner, the horse, the drummer. They are shorn of their usual specificity: the arch to what? Whose banner? Do they emerge from a historical limbo? We see what is represented, but what do they represent?

At times it seems so dumb, as in a recent untitled painting where a horse’s head is planted dead centre on the canvas. But this is not the unmodulated presentation of New Image Painting: what happens around the image or motif in the field of the painting is as important as the image or motif itself, perhaps more important. There is a narrative, a provenance of paint and marks on and about the horse. This process of both accumulation and erasure has passed around and across, like sand or earth moving on and affecting some geographical feature, or else it is like snow piling on, then drifting away from, some trace - a foot-mark, or some lost item or half-forgotten image that is now in part revealed. The motif exists not only in space but in the fictional time ceated by painting: it has a history.

Although the horse’s face catches our eyes, it is the brushwork around it that works upon our emotions, much as it is the orchestra's music that will affect us in an opera while our eyes concentrate on the stage and the words of the singers. Le Brun has a feeling for the canvas as though for a skin, a sensual surface - similar to Jasper Johns, whose work is, however, informed by an irony very different to Le Brun’s attitude. Le Brun’s fascination by Fragonard and Watteau has a lot to do with their similar feel for the sensuous texture of canvas, paint and mark.

Just as in his paintings the field is predominantly abstract so in at least one recent painting, a shield, is itself not abstract no more than emblematic. It does little more than act as a focus for the act of painting (and as a focus for the viewer’s look). It is a point of anchorage for the painterly field which must itself carry all the weight of meaning. Likewise in a recent, but destroyed, painting, a moon hung in a sky of grey and blue paint swathesœ the atmosphere walike that of a Chinese landscape, quiet, lyrical, and relaxed. But he wanted a more jarring image, something that though complete still revealed the arguments of its completion, its complex conception and labour.

As a student he made abstract painting of vertical and horizontal brushstrokes: this tisage of paint is still a trademark, though decreasingly so. Frequently the brushmarks with their repetitious vertical and horizontal swathes play out a game of rediscovery and loss with the motif. The painting method has developed naturally from his early abstract work, but has been challenged and honed by the irruption of figurative imagery. Although the paintings mentioned above are nearly abstract (and indeed signal a conscious decision from too unadulterated a figuration) his persistent claim that he is first and foremost an abstract painter is to a great extent disingenuous. When we look at his pictures we have the expectation of an invented world in which the associations of figurative elements are called into play. He claims, and there is no reason to disbelieve it, that the images begin unselfconsciously - they are born of the to and fro of brushwork, This still leaves the question of where the images come from. They are neither mere accidents, nor occasions for paint. Their explication by phenomenology, psychoanalytic theory and cultural history is inevitable and appropriate - however incomplete such an explication may remain, What is surprising is that commentators on Le Brun's work have shied away from any such explication. It is important to realise that these are slow paintings, created over a long period. They are meditations. In a recent large painting, Union, a horse stares back at us, behind it is a red Saint Andrew's cross, to the left a large black circle, and to the right a large white circle. The painting is enigmatic: the two circles (symbols of completion?) are opposite colours yet their exact significance, enormous though it seems, remains uncertain. In North London in Kenwood house there is a late Rembrandt self-portrait in which he places himself between two similar circles. For years Rembrandt scholars have puzzled unsuccessfully over their exact significance. The coincidence of these two paintings with their similar usage of paired circles appears to be fortuitous, but serves to point out some revealing parallels. Given the establishment of the motif - himself as a painter - the Rembrandt picture is composed of essentially abstract marks, notably the slurrying on the circles and the curious scratchings on the collar. It is a painterly manner of meditation, and so it is with Le Brun: a rumination of marks against and upon an object. The marks like geographical strata note its passage through tme. Both Rembrandt’s face and Le Brun’s horse look back at us as if from some fictional mirror. They return our gaze, they demand questions.

After Freud it is unavoidable that we should see the horse in Le Brun (as in the American painter Susan Rothenburg) as a symbol of active sexuality. There is always something mysterious or distant about Le Brun’s horses: in the absence of human female figures in his paintings are we to read them as symbols of some female principle (the ‘ever-womanly’ Goethe refers to in Faust)?

A few years ago when I first met Le Brun he was atypically painting a life size horse in totally naturalistic style. Although it the painting was not only impressive but surprisingly convincing he over-painted it and did not repeat the experiment. He may refer to a tradition of horse representations or painting, but his work does not ultimately belong to it. Likewise though he has ridden horses he is in no great way a horseman: the horse is first and foremost a poetic motif, an image to which emotions and associations adhere.

It would be tempting, as vulgar Freudianism would have it, to see the rider on his mount here as a triumph of the male principle over the female. But all the affective evidence of the paintings denies this: on those where there is a human rider he and the horse are united lyrically as equals. There is a lyricism, a sensibility that forbids any possibility of this being a paean to masculinity. Should not one see this as a projected unification of male and female within oneself?

For the main current of meaning in the horse motif we are most correct in turning to the ways in which the horse has been employed in Western art as a representation of power, beauty, elegance, and so forth. If we look at the regal equestrian portraits of Velasquez and Rubens we see images of nobility and control. In the neo-classical period this transition is continued, though the horse becomes more self-consciously a symbol of property. Should we look at, for example, Copley’s Siege and Relief of Gibraltar from 1783 we see the commander Lord Heathfield most unrealistically riding to the edge of the battlements to make a grandiloquent gesture at the burning Spanish fleet. The horse elevates him and also makes him appear to as untouchable as it itself seems. In the midst of the slaughter and costumed posturing it is pureœ it is a pastoral symbol strayed into a battle seen.

It can be argued that Stubbs, the great horse painter of that period, painted horses as much for their value as neoclassic motifs - against which one reacts phenomenologically, as from an objects gestalt - as for their value as breeding stock or gambling investment. Certainly the aesthetic power of the best Stubbs painting is far greater than was necessary for his horseflesh connoisseur patrons. Like Le Brun Stubbs was pre-occupied with the formal effect of painting per se. The nature of the motif is to attract our attention, pin us down frontally, to let painting infiltrate our flanks. Above all else it confronts us, returns our gaze, questions us. Baselitz, of course, uses the motif in much this manner. In his earlier paintings Le Brun used the elements of Claudian, ideal landscapes to do this, or else millstones or islands. Now he uses either the more ideologically loaded horse or human figure, or contrarywise, motifs as redundant of meaning as shields or generalised emblems. It is easy to see some echo in Le Brun of fin de siecle painters such as Bocklin or Hans van Marées, with their dark colours and brooding atmospheres. Although he does not conceal his enthusiasm for these sometimes powerful, but often fusty, painters the most appropriate parallel for his art and his concerns (and this applies to many of his contemporaries) can be found in the neo-classical and romantic search for a high art in the late English and American eighteenth century. Like West, Copley, Stubbs or Fuseli, his desire is for a unification of drives, for paintings that project a coherent moral and emotionally enriching vision.

Perhaps in no painting is this ambition to take on the issues of history painting and high art so evident as in Marcus Curtius. Like many of the favourite neo-classical subjects it is about a man putting the state and the common good before personal well being. Davids Brutus or Leonidas, or West’s Death of General Wolfe, come instantly to mind. Lempriere's classical dictionary gives the story thus; “Marcus Curtius, a Roman youth who devoted himself to the gods Manes for the safety of his country about 360BC. A wide gap called afterwards Curtius Iacus had suddenly opened in the Forum, and the oracle had said that it never would close before Rome threw into it whatever it held most precious. Curtius immediately perceived that no less than a human sacrifice was required. He armed himself, mounted his horse, and solemnly threw himself into the gulf, which instantly closed upon his head.” The story unlike any chosen by David or West has an element of absurdity to it; it is the stuff of myth rather than history. It is a primitive and magical act of exchange. In the painting Curtius remains shadowy, the horse is more clearly formed as is the banner to the right. Formally the painting is complex with its variations in depicted depths and figurative specificities. In terms of affective connotation the painting is equally complex: our initial reaction to the sheer lushness of the painting's surface conflicts with our initial feelings for the archaic tale of self-sacrifice. This is at once the heroic and the mock-heroic: Le Brun’s attitude to his protagonist is ambiguous, ironic. The painting creates questions: “What is heroism, the noble? Where does it reside? Can it exist now in this world? If so what form may it take in terms of painting?” It must be noted that Le Brun’s attitude to the act of painting is however never ironic, but otherwise he creates more questions than he answers, much as he does with his use of the horse motif. Indeed he does the same with his ‘Arcadian’ landscapes; it is our reactions to these dream landscapes that is bought into question not his.

At a time when many painters show such a high public profile it is worth noting that Le Brun remains from the evidence a of his paintings and their attendant publicity a relatively shadowy figure. His ironic stance enables him to stand apart from the finished paintingsž there are few painters today less expressionistic in intention or manner than he. Each painting is worked on over a very long period until it has developed an existence, a particularity, a quidditas of its own from which he may retire. Outside painting Le Brun takes cricket, the English summer game, seriously. As a batsman he is, as one would expect, a stylist: scoring runs comes as an inevitable result of correct and elegant play. There is no need for bludgeoning or unnecessary bravura: for the stylist, or dandy, results come from the manner of doing something. Le Brun’s insistence that the imagery develops naturally from the act of painting in part derives from this: paint well and meaning will emerge. Le Brun does not see himself so much speaking through painting as allowing painting to speak through him. That unconscious that we all, to some degree, share speaks” it is given voice.

As a colourist Le Brun comes out of Venetian painting and Anglo-American abstract painting of the last few decades. But if his painting has devolved from such painters it has been further and critically charged by drawing. Talking of the Stockwell painters, a group of English Poons-like abstract painters, he once said “if you take those flat patches of colour, what's missing is the warping of them at the edge, the twisting of them back into the picture space. This involves drawing and shaping”. It is drawing, with its shaping capabilities, that give the painting form: the energy inherent in colour is channelled by drawing. Perhaps drawing holds here the same relation to colour as the rider does to the horse: the ego controlling the id, directing and shaping it. But it is psychic unity not internal domination that is sought.

If we talk of his symbolism it is also worth noting that the colours he uses often retain their traditional associations: the white of purity, the black of night, the blue of sky the red of fire. Interestingly, the last highlights applied to a Le Brun Painting are often red: it is a keying colour. Fire transforms.

Outside the paintings, drawing is for him a parallel but separate practice. Without colour the drawings seem to create a different world, represent a different order of experience. If the paintings are at once epiphanies on the irruptions of the unconscious and meditations in flesh, then the drawings are reveries where we find elegance and mood rather than nobility and passion.

The Arcadian imagery is more obvious in the drawings than in the paintings. They are above all else images of departure. Boats, dreaming figures and an exploratory, searching line are typical. There is not here the struggle we sense in the paintings, nor is there such as sense of immanence. It is the drawings rather than the paintings that connect him to the symbolist painters, for these are evocations of dream, mood and metaphor. The images of departure can, no doubt, be seen as metaphors for psychic release. But even here we must realise the independence of line, of mark making as a free and unrepressed activity.

In a curious recent painting a white horse with rider emerges from behind a large black circle (perhaps a rock or shield or mirror), whilst their elongated shadow is thrown black against the background. It looks strangely like a Greek vase painting with its sharp outlines and contrasted colours of black, white and earth green. The horse and its shadow is the latest variation on the horse motif: the shadow is at once radically different from the horse and inextricably linked. The shadow is but a function of the form and yet is different in both colour and shape. As in Union opposites are, if not reconciled, at least made co-existent: the image itself echoes the way in which the activity of painting seeks cogency and coherence.

It is difficult not to be reminded of Plato’s cave: that metaphor for human existence where people are pictured as captives in a cave where all they can see are the thrown shadows of passing people and their baggage. They take the illusions, the representations with all their distortions and omissions for reality. But what is more real in painting: the shadow or the body? The world as representation knows no distinction between the two: both fictions and realities may be true.

Considering his use of fictions it would be all too easy to connect Le Brun’s work to that of the Pittura Colta painters and their knowing (and rather coy) use of classical imagery to create a bitter-sweet atmosphere of nostalgia. After all, what place do winged horses, unmanned boats, cypress tree covered islands have in contemporary art and experience? Is this not the fustian imagery of fin de siecle symbolism regurgitated for jaded historicist tastes? Though much in these complaints may apply to Pittura Colta it does not apply for all the reasons given above to Le Brun. His paintings are far more than nostalgic entertainments. They lack that cloying sense of foiled sexuality and narcissism which symbolism all too often wallows in. Where Pittura Colta returns to the past, he develops from it; he uses it. Culture is to him not in the past like a dinner service shut away in a cupboard, but something continuous that has never been shut away or finished.

At the root of much contemporary art is the awareness of the inchoate or fragmented subject. Thus we see the American David Salle adopting the role of entrepreneur rather than author, or we see the French artist Alberola's conjectures of disparate ways of picturing, or we see Walter Dahn and Dokoupil’s refusal to accept a consistent autographic style. All too easily the stylist becomes pasticheur: the bricoleur caught in the endless double binds of irony is not of this sort: he may use it ultimately to withdraw from the painting, to self-efface, but part of the struggle in his work is to destroy irony in painting per se, to destroy any hint of parody.

Some of the more millennial writers on recent painting seem to search it for redemption, to use it to sublimate homeless feelings of spiritual distress. This is, if understandable, extremely suspect. In the world of Le Brun’s art there has been neither original sin nor a fall. But there is a sense of loss and dislocation which must be faced up to and repaired. Painting can act as a model of, or mode for, coherence - of the restored and re-located subject. Our pleasure in the picture is not to be ephemeral, but to be one of cultural satisfaction - a sense of belonging and potentiality for the human animal in this world. Painting cannot “redeem” us, or solve our problems, but it can give us a picture of a more satisfactory way of existing with the world.

The great problem for European painting now is to conceive and re-present the figure in the landscape. Kiefer can only denote such a figure by signs of his absence: the inscribed palette, the writing, and with that most sardonic parody of the wandering hero of German Romantic painting the assault gun in the field. Chia can only place the figure in his background by by stylising he background to an eclectic tapestry. The figures of the German Heftige Malerei painters reside in an urban limbo that they themselves have arbitrarily invented. These are all special cases. Of course Le Brun’s are too: his winged figures in strange placeless landscapes, or his Arthurian knights wandering through a garden of paintmarks, or as in some very recent paintings, the drummer boy at the centre of a scarcely differentiated landscape. But ultimately enough special cases begin to indicate a norm.

The quandary of the figure and the landscape is especially felt in England with its longstanding but now rather moribund landscape tradition. How do we re-integrate with a ‘Nature’ we no longer believe in? As with the Stoic philosophers so long ago we are strangers in a world we have not made. Creative culture seeks to uncover this trap of alienation, of social and psychic disenfranchisement. For Le Brun and others there is a possibility of doing this in painting.