Brian WOOD

Brian Wood
Paintings

GALLERY HOURS: Thurs- Mon 12-5pm
Full color on-line catalogue with essay by Eleanor Heartney 

Brian Wood’s solo exhibition of paintings opens Friday, August 25th with a reception for the artist from 5 – 8 pm at Cross Contemporary Art in Saugerties, NY.

The process of consciousness has always been the source of inquiry for Wood’s work. The boundaries and limits of awareness hold a particular fascination for Wood and it seems likely that the obsessions in his work originate in the earliest phase of life before language and before self – the “chora” in Julia Kristeva’s description. At the beginning of life, instinctual drives, locality, suffering and pleasure, aggression, holding, repulsion, devouring and expelling merge in a timeless non-reflective realm.

Wood is very interested in the way images flash into awareness, fluoresce, and die. He makes a distinction between the images of fantasy (wishing, planning, regretting, wanting) and the very different experience of mental images that seem to arrive from outside of the ego and have the intensity of the real – they light up the nervous system and consciousness with an aliveness that approaches hallucination. It is this level of image and its transformations that he’s interested in discovering and experiencing in his painting – that first flash of image that arrives before the inevitable tip toward language, discursive thought, and narrative fantasy. Importantly, he discovers these pre-linguistic images in the direct process of painting – they could not exist in this form outside of painting. Rather than representations or illustrations of already experienced thought, the manipulation of paint reveals the image in its making.

As Eleanor Heartney describes Wood’s paintings: “They balance on the cusp between abstraction and representation, teasing us with details that seem sharp and tangible but refuse to cohere into any definitive image or narrative. … Wood’s paintings offer us glimpses of possibly recognizable things or places, but “human meaning” as [Wallace] Stevens would style it, remains just out of reach.” And as Holland Cotter recently wrote in the New York Times about Brian Wood: “…[Wood] creates a kind of Symbolist world in which emerging into life and being devoured by it are part of the same inexorable process. …the erotic and the spiritual are of a piece.”