STAN
BRODSKY

... understanding we must look with an almost physical empathy at the painting itself. These late paintings have direct purity of intent and expression. There is no “it’s about” in these paintings; there are no ideas. Refreshingly and distinctively, these paintings are without irony or pretense.

How we describe any painting is important. We want to retain the spirit of painterly purity and direct emotion. One could default to simply saying they are visual and therefore attempting to describe them with words misses their essence. I do, in part, agree. However, the articulation of our feelings through language helps create culture around the works. Language has value to art and I think this especially true with abstract art. The writings of Klee, Kandinsky and Matisse, along with many others, attest to this and each was among the purist of painters.

Contemplation that leads to direct empathy with the painting is the means of discovery in “Ode to Color.” Brodsky’s subject is the condition of being moved. Know that each time you sense a movement, see space open, see light, Brodsky was motivated by his painterly emotion. We must understand his paintings as unfolding in time; they are not images, symbols or signs that we take in all at once and say, “We saw a Brodsky.” They are to be mulled, examined, admired, and dreamt in, all through sustained looking. His paintings are about discovery and surprise and induce a flow of emotion. If we follow him, we are moved.

The purist goal of the painter is to make a fully spatial experience on a flat surface. Brodsky does this primarily with color. Color generates movement and movement creates time and space, or I prefer in this case, air. These recent paintings replace the movement of gesture with breath.

“Ode to Color,” because of its size, creates a physical intimacy with the viewer; it is big enough to engulf your whole body. It has a hum of magenta and orange light that radiates and seemingly envelopes our bodies. These paintings create a beautiful climate to freely move in.

There is a truism in painting that the first lines of any painting are the four edges of the canvas. With Brodsky the edges are terribly important and rather than having them as a stable constant, they are also moving and in play as the stability of the four edges are painted in such a way that they constantly shift in space in relation to the internal colors.

Within this overall magenta orange light there are various other cool colors. The diagonal ultramarine lines in the lower left invite us in and lead to a cyan blue vertical column that says, “Not this way – no, go left,” and you’re on your way to a lush move through a pure magenta warm light. Some of the lines and forms are in multiples, a series of varying but similar strokes. Turquoise triplets unfold. There is a quartet of orange forms in the upper left. To the right, a form of red on top of yellow, on top of orange, on top of magenta, that abruptly snaps off to the right. Nothing is static, our eyes keep moving and enough variety is supplied to keep us engaged for a meaningful duration. Color forms are not singular in identity; an orange form is overlaid with red, yellow-orange, umber, sienna, all in a luminous little rectangular patch. Turquoise appears again, this time to a completely new effect (brightness) on cobalt. Light flickers with the scumbling of brush strokes and paint stick. There are a variety of hidden colors, colors that emerge with time, with looking, hidden bits of ochre and of pink that contribute in a role too important to call secondary but that are braided into an overwhelming richness. Colors are in constant dialogue, whispering or shouting, all modulating endlessly in response to each other, and depending on how you see them, providing a feeling of familiarity or a surprise encounter. The painting is filled with what I call “color events.” It has a great liveliness.

Brodsky’s recent work lacks the bluster of the big-armed gesture and replaces it with a gentle sensuousness of touch. This directly reflects his personal tenderness; the light is warm and the touch is soft. We are moved by the sensuousness of it.

Brodsky does not care about ideas, only experience, and primarily the emotional experience, of color. What keeps these paintings from being isolating, idiosyncratic or mired in pure self-indulgence, is color itself, the universality of color. The colors do not belong to Brodsky – color is shared nature. But the art, the emotion of these colors, is liberated by Brodsky’s feelings when he turns them into light and creates the sense of these colors moving in space. He takes color out of our mundane nature and places it in relationship, making it available to be felt.  As Marcel Proust said, “Art, if it means awareness of our own life, means also awareness of the lives of other people.”

The courage of Brodsky is that he gives up the illusion of objectivity and instead paints a concentrated abstract work, in which, by empathy, he purely identifies himself and his emotions. In these paintings Brodsky recreates his own true life and invites us to experience our own.