Matthew Brown • Kohn Turner Gallery, Los Angeles

The paintings of Matthew Brown are achingly, shockingly beautiful. Shimmering just below the saturated and glazed surfaces are poignant themes of human alienation, the severing of human beings from their own humanity, the separation of people from the natural world. Above all, the painter is involved with the fate of a Nature distanced from life and reduced to tamed Culture. Deliberately preventing an easy admiration or appreciation, Brown offsets the sensuousness of his work with a fine-tuned intellectualism that jolts the viewer with uneasy subject matter. These paintings are depictions of depictions, mediated by the camera lens that always comes between the artist and the cultural artifacts encountered. The “Peaceable Kingdom” is a photographed, unnatural diorama world of slaughtered and stuffed animals, selected and sacrificed by professional hunters, the most perfect natural specimens to be re-displayed in their new and unnatural habitat. The urban public, long unfamiliar with the wild, is given tableaux of fierce animals, forever and reassuringly stilled and held captive inside the museum and caged behind sheets of glass. pride of lions in the peaceable kingdom is deliberately salon-sized, recalling a long-forgotten history of huge paintings about things that really mattered. In its horizontality, in its flanking by real trees, albeit carefully contained and potted, this postmodern grande machine remembers Albert Bierstadt’s famous diorama paintings, complete with plants, sound, and light effects. Bierstadt, like others of his generation, painted from life and brought the jungles of South America and the virgin wilderness of the West back to the dazzled spectators of the East who inspected the detailed flora and fauna through field glasses.
But Brown is removed from his object. For the past few years, he has been painting landscapes that are so far removed from plain air that the works demand a new definition of landscape. In painting the managed exotica of the mannered picturesque presentations of these museum landscapes, Brown transforms the unreal into paintings of a culturescape. He explores the intersection between habits of perception and the way we see nature, framed by a camera, romanticized in movies, or through a pane of glass, darkly. “Nature” has become a staged construction that Brown re-enchants by gently moving his camera filled with slow-speed film, softening the harsh truth of stuffed animals and turning the reflections on the window barrier into streaks of light. The animals are freed, re-spiritualized, redeemed and returned to nature.
But what about the human animal? The human is just another creature who has been tracked down by society, captured by social conventions and stuffed with nihilism and despair, displayed so artlessly and unselfconsciously in the “Parallel World” of the recent Helter Skelter exhibition in Los Angeles. From the safety of activities conveniently labeled as “art,” one male artist after another revealed intimate insecurities about manhood, sexual prowess, and his role in a world where “men” are but constructed commodities expected to perform on demand. Working entirely from slides and carefully distanced from the painfully alienated masculinity, Brown repaints Paul MacCarthy’s overwhelming sexual obsessions and anxieties, originally displayed in a huge diorama that took over an entire room in the Temporary Contemporary. Matthew Brown rescues MacCarthy’s mechanized and tormented male sexual machine, softens the onanistic content of the installation and transforms the machine into a man who re-engages with nature. The reworking of one artist by another gains power from viewers who remember the original confrontation between Man and Nature.
The artificiality of culture acts as tangibly as the glass encasing the dioramas or the lens of the camera and builds barriers between the human and the natural. The artist’s use of the camera suggests that we can see only through the gaze of media mediation, and yet the paintings produced as a result of artifice and distancing are filled with yearning for nature, a longing for the real. In contrast to institutionalized art, Brown’s paintings attempt to be as pure as if they were painted on the site. There is both irony and poignancy in Brown’s work, for he can only translate the cultural artifacts of art into yet another artifact and the futility of his deed serves to underline humanity’s need for spiritualization. The odd effect of old-fashioned spirit photography, seen in the streaking of the glossy surfaces, give the human and animal presences a ghost-like quality as though the dead are re-remembering their formerly free selves. The paintings by Matthew Brown are seductive in the sumptuous and luxurious physicality of their presence, and yet the lure is denied with the difficult and dangerous content of animals, human and otherwise, stilled and frozen and dead in their state of cultural enthrallment.
Jeanne S. M. Willette
Los Angeles, California
1995

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