CAN Journal | The Eyebrows Say "WHOA!"

Paintings can foreshorten and remake experience, transcribing in a directly sensual, primal tongue.  This ambitious undertaking is often bitter and disappointing — but pocked with thrilling episodes. It’s a search for the kind of truth that immediacy conveys, a body-to-body, first person narrative approach to communication. Either there’s no room for error, or (more likely) the error is all the room you can find. When the artist succeeds, the difference between looking and touching begins to blur and melt.

Certainly that’s what the painter Justin Brennan is up to in his urgent search for ever more direct forms of visual/tactile speech. Like certain drugs seeping past the blood-brain barrier, Brennan’s paintings bypass the usual systems of absorption. At their best they awaken the eye to new awareness as they stir some forgotten patch of the unconscious mind, delivering a moment that seems to be part of more vividly real world.  A sample of his recent works are on view in General Maintenance, January 13 – March 5, 2021, at HEDGE Gallery.

During the past year most people around the globe have been perversely, reluctantly united by an awareness of a common enemy. COVID-19 has changed the way that many humans negotiate their imaginative relations with daily life, forced into semi-hiding, altering patterns of behavior and cloaking all but the most private hours of the day behind a mask. We notice different things, we are more aware of our life-in-death situation. Getting through the day can be like texting at a funeral. Brennan’s paintings are of a piece with that warped state of affairs.