Like all really good painters, Michael Brennan understands the mercurial nature of paint, how it embraces the dual identities of both material and image. He never forces paint to do something it doesn’t want to do. Instead, he lets it find itself and in so doing, finds the image it wants to make. This ability to grant paint its autonomy while at the same time controlling its direction is the crux of his talent and a sign of his mastery over paint’s sometimes fickle nature. What is immediately clear in this group of paintings at Minus Space, is that Brennan knows what he is doing and knows, also, that the paintings that have emerged from his wrist and palette knife have achieved the life in image that they sought.

 

Brennan’s paintings reference the world, or rather, they seek the world as a template onto which impressions, associations, history and imagination coalesce. It is as if the original Platonic image is not a specific referent, but a changeable, evanescent shadow out of which something iconic emerges. The titles of Brennan’s paintings evoke specific places and things, but to give these references a literal reading would be misleading and perhaps even miss the point of what pictures actually do. In Black Mountain Stars, for instance, a dark central mass of thickly applied paint, rising from the lower edge, tethers the image to the horizon-like bottom while shards of gloaming light surround the mass, halo-like, and make a “sky”. One might assume the mass to be the “mountain” and the flying shards the stars. But looking close into the paint, one sees the mineral content and crushed glass he adds to the paint, glitter and sparkle like stars, and Black Mountain can only refer to the pedagogic phenomenon that lit aflame the imaginations of a whole generation of American artists. And what those artists taught us is that the content of painting is a collaboration between a material we can know but an affect we can only imagine.

 

The images at Minus Space are highly focused extrusions of single sittings. This is in keeping with Brennan’s affinity for Japanese film and literature and the aesthetic of the lean and essential.  Like the perfect choreography of calligraphy, he seeks the practice of studied spontaneity, in which the lessons of the wrist, once learned, are free to improvise like a good jazz riff.  His paintings are all monochromes, of blues, grays, black and green. Again, the reduction of input leads to a maximum of concentrated output. His images are distillations of years of looking and practicing; listening to what the paint is saying as he herds its viscous molecules into a living thing. In these paintings, viscosity is more than a physical state, or a signifier of artfulness.  It is a condition of being and a trigger for emotional response. As in the Japanese art he admires, there is no separation between the physical and the spiritual; they are a helix, inextricably bound to one another.