External Reflections

Patrick Berran, Untitled (PB 641), 2017, Acrylic and toner on panel

Exhibition review

Patrick Berran
Chapter NY
249 East Houston Street
September 10 – October 22, 2017

Patrick Berran’s latest paintings at Chapter NY have the electricity of a classic Jackson Pollock: what at first appears to be a complicated visual explosion is in fact a carefully regulated site for contemplation. But instead of being gestural, Berran’s paintings are the product of a mechanical process that seems to remove the hand of the artist.

The artist’s sketchbook drawings, which may be non-representational or representationally inspired, are enlarged on a photocopier to the point of breaking up into irregular spots, like a television static pattern or animal-print fabric. Berran then uses a solvent to transfer these patterned fields onto canvas, interlacing them with sharply defined or soft-edged fields of color. Layers are piled up and sandwiched to create semi-permeable screens. Berran’s paintings are full of skittery, off-register marks reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print (1953). Warm peachy pinks and hot oranges and reds glow from beneath the surface like blood under the skin.

Patrick Berran, Untitled (PB 645), 2017, Acrylic and toner on panel

Patrick Berran, Untitled (PB 643), 2017, Acrylic and toner on panel

The exhibition includes six solidly medium-sized paintings and one small canvas; all are Untitled, 2017, and all are acrylic and toner on panel. Each is satisfyingly layered with areas of color and pattern overlapping in bar-like rectangles. Long, thin forms at the sides or running through the middle echo the edges of the canvas and the stretchers that support it. Streaked or cloudy atmospheric passages, as well as frequently asymmetrical compositions, create tension between the hand-made and the mechanical. Subtle shifts in color appear as you get closer, with gradients spanning multiple hues. While in Berran’s previous work the forms were often laid on top of a white background, here the figure/ground relation is more ambiguous. Dark or saturated colors may serve as ground, like the black edges in Untitled (PB 643) or the reds and yellows of Untitled (PB 645). Yet all the paintings have white showing through, reasserting the originary canvas. The complexity and generosity of the compositions has a Turneresque sublimity, but the consistently reasserted rectilinear framework reassures us that things won’t get out of control. In contrast to the calm clarity of Diebenkorn’s rectangle-based Ocean Park series, which is equally abstract and contemplative, Berran's work is infused with a punk rock style informed by surfer and skateboard culture. The affect is similar to the heavily postered, torn walls of Jacques Villeglé. Berran’s contrasting hot and cold colors (icy blue reappears), along with his liberal use of black, give the paintings a contemporary, digital severity.

Patrick Berran, Untitled (PB 646), 2017, Acrylic and toner on panel

In one work, Untitled (PB 646), an insistent smaller frame in the middle of the image suggests a mirror. But instead of seeing ourselves or the world reflected in it, we see a patterned surface of warm gray and black that closes off vision, and redirects our view outward to the margins of the canvas. Berran’s paintings are viewfinders on an internal world, screens on which raw visual experience is distilled and transformed into rich, layered notations. They invite us to look inward as we are looking out, and to recognize the buzzing complexity within.

--Jeff Frederick

Framing the Push

Sharon Brant, “An Uncertain Geometry” (2016)
Oil stick and alkyd on canvas, 36 x 48 inches
Image courtesy Minus Space

Exhibition Review

Sharon Brant: Paintings 2004 Through 2010
Galerie Tanja Grunert
May 5 - June 18, 2016 (extended)

Brant / Brennan / Zinsser
Minus Space
June 4 - July 2, 2016


Sharon Brant’s paintings, from two distinct phases and in two handsome exhibitions, create palpable forces and spaces. At Tanja Grunert in Manhattan, the hard edges of rectilinear forms mostly hug the borders of small, variously sized rectangular paintings, highlighting the material details of the fabric supports. At Minus Space in Brooklyn, Brant’s more recent paintings stretch the canvases into longer horizontal dimensions, and the painted forms relax into themselves, with rougher lines and a more limited palette. Travel across boroughs offers you a mini-survey of powerfully “empty” fields.

Immediately upon entering Galerie Tanja Grunert, I was struck by Brant’s understated command. The artist sometimes coats her fabric supports with a clear medium; sometimes she articulates them with all-over, lush, white brushstrokes through which the raw fibers seem to be straining to surface. These textures become highly noticeable because Brant outlines the space of the canvas using carefully applied, thin lines of colors (black, the primaries, silver) which boldly offset the raw fabrics’ hues: straw, jute, sackcloth, and clay. Her outlines trace the edges of the rectangular pieces, or create a square or rectangle within the larger field. Either way, your attention is made to focus more precisely than in Jo Baer's outlined fields: Brant’s paintings are small enough that you perceive tiny details such as warps in a linen weave, slight diagonal deviations within the border lines, nubs of congealed paint, a crease in the underlying canvas. Works in the back of the exhibition substitute porous graphite lines for the wide painted ones, foreshadowing Brant's movement toward edgeless, drawn forms.

In contrast to the earlier, tentative airiness of the graphite lines, current paintings in the Minus Space exhibition play at full throttle, weaving black or carmine gestural forms into heavily worked white surfaces. They appear to be figures on grounds, but are they? The “background” textures are as malleable and charged as those of the color-saturated lines and shapes. No wonder she calls these works “uncertain geometries”... When Brant layers white over some painted lines, the underlying colors simmer with occult force. While the earlier works had reversed the figure-ground relation, now form and negative space are in constant, fluid interchange. Brant reveals the insistent quality of all matter -- solid (shapes), liquid (paint), or gas (“backgrounds”). And now, when she obscures lines that limn a horizontal edge (don’t miss the painting in the office), the half-buried borders indicate hidden layers of deepened space.* I think of Susan Hefuna’s layered grids, Terri Rolland’s wicket shapes, and the expert freedom of Katherine Bradford’s brushwork.

Coincidentally (?), all the artists I immediately imagined as Brant’s reference points are women. From 1989 until 1996, when she was in her 40s, Brant was a member of the A.I.R. Gallery, created by and for women artists. If Brant's strong, sensitive technique is dubbed feminist / female, is the work constrained or enriched? In any case, now that the New York Times is trending seasoned and laudable women artists, Brant too deserves more recognition.

– Karen Schiff

* The hints of color that sometimes line the outer edges of Brant’s canvases are echoed in Michael Brennan’s oil paintings of ghostly effects on the opposite wall. And while these bodies of work support each other, John Zinsser’s large red square gives the room a center of gravity. (At Tanja Grunert, Brant’s paintings are also presented with other artists’ works, but there the space is organized so that each has a separate exhibition.)

Sharon Brant, “Nov. 9, 2008” (2008)
Acrylic and graphite on linen
Image courtesy Galerie Tanja Grunert

Sharon Brant, "An Uncertain Geometry" (2016)
Oil stick and alkyd on canvas, 18 x 72 inches
Image courtesy Minus Space