OPENING: May 5 | ERIC BROWN | Already and Not Yet

NEW YORK - April 29, 2022 - PRLog -- Jennifer Baahng Gallery is pleased to announce the gallery representation of Eric Brown and his inaugural show, Already and Not Yet.  Central to this new body of work is process.  Brown employs the sacred process of repetitive mark-making and a meticulous and personal approach to painting to create literal and visual weavings.  The resultant paintings appear as handmade textiles that invite an up-close looking.  Already and Not Yet evokes metaphors of strength and vulnerability, imperfection, mending, and domesticity.  The exhibition will run from May 5 to June 11, 2022.

At first glance, the works in Already and Not Yet suggest woven textiles, but they are not paintings of textiles or any singular subject, moment, or linear plot.  Drawing on philosopher Roland Barthes' theory that text is a living fabric interwoven with multiple meanings, Brown shows in these works a striving for a new painterly language.  Where it is the nature of semantics to constrain and shape meaning, his painted marks-on-canvas offer a "longhand," open to the vastness of interpretation, capable of suggesting more than just partial answers.

The Particulars of Rapture (2022), named after a poem by Wallace Stevens, is comprised of three paintings that echo each other with similar themes but individually look different.  A visual tension materialized, the work is an elegant manifestation of the cerebral conundrums questioned by the artist.  Painted freehand, there is a tenderness of human engagement.

Spirit, Groan Inwardly While We Wait (2020), created around the first weeks of the pandemic, is the source from which the rest of the works in this show originated.  It consists of four various sized panels configured into a cross with an implied fifth panel in the center.  Determinedly cross-hatched, through symbolism and abstraction, the work refers to human form and nature.  It is calm, temperamental, compelling, and yearning for everyday small miracles.

Intimate, quotidian, diaristic, potent, the works in Already and Not Yet are neither realist nor expressionist.  They are direct and unadorned.  Repeated delicate marks seemingly fluctuate with natural light and heave in breathing spaces.  Already and Not Yet proposes that the spiritual in art may happen on a small scale, rather than in grand, orchestral gestures, and reveals the artist in pursuit of a new abstract vocabulary.

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