John Brown Solo Exhibition 2019 :Olga Korper Gallery

John Brown

June 8, 2019 – July 13, 2019

John Brown’s recent work delves unabashedly into loss and memory. Having acted as a caretaker for many years before his partner’s passing, John has explored the depths of that emotional and psychological experience in his paintings. Continuing his iconic style of applying oil paint on board that is layered, sanded and scraped, layered, sanded and scraped, until ghosts of images emerge familiar to the artist (if not the viewer). In this exhibition John has turned his attention to history and memory.

In Love Letter 1 and Love Letter 2, John has recreated sections of his partner’s diary. The first painting depicts an excerpt from 1962, where Herb has journaled his itinerary from the Peace Corps. He has just been outed as a homosexual, and forced to leave. Legible among the texture of scratches and scrapes in paint are the words ‘the end’, the end of his career to date, the end of his knowing and experience, the end of his plans carefully planned…but to John, from his place in the future, it was the beginning of everything: before Herb found the arts, before his position as a curator, before his long and esteemed career, before John.

Love Letter 2 shows Herb’s handwriting 50 years later, in 2012. Almost illegible, and further obscured by the artist, it is more an emotional depiction of a mind at work than a literal one. Already plagued by dementia, these are the overlapping and occasionally crossed-out words of the man he cared for near the end of his life. Two paintings encompassing a life together, in sickness and in health.

John paints memories filtered through the lens of hindsight. In Love Letter 1, everything worked out better than young Herb could have known at the time. In Love Letter 2, having painted his partner’s words after his passing, John sees Herb’s life from an even further distance, from youth to its end, and the permanent impression that remains.

Every painting in the exhibition has a shared thoughtful commentary on this theme. They have an airy, almost nostalgic quality. The central images taken from pictures in the artist’s studio or movies he saw once, an opera on the radio, all from a distance, as if through a veil. The 200 miniscule portraits are sections of a series of paintings made for a choreographer, showing figures in motion. Now he sees the small faces as ghosts. John titled them Listen Spirits Listen, and you can feel the hush when you engage with them, as though they are each turning to you in tandem to hear about your life, about your legacy, and to remind you of the life after life.