Critical Essays on the work of Brian Wood
“Brian Wood’s Art Beyond Thought”
Eleanor Heartney
"Wallace Stevens’ poem, Of Mere Being, is a paean to the ineffability of the poetic imagination. It provides and incandescent image of those feelings that hover tantalizingly “at the end of the mind,” not yet tugged and flattened by the operations of reason into verbalizable thoughts. Though a master of words, Stevens spent his life exploring what they couldn’t do. His poems live in the gap between the intelligible and the intuitive, or, as he puts it in another poem, between “the nothing that is not here and the nothing that is.”
Brian Wood inhabits this same territory. His paintings originate in what he described in a 1994 interview as the “prelinguistic roots of consciousness.” They balance on the cusp between abstraction and representation, teasing us with details that seem sharp and tangible but refuse to cohere into any definitive image or narrative. In this they resemble memory. Breaking loose from their moorings, fragments of remembered images and ideas float within a sea of inchoate sensations. Wood’s paintings offer us a similar glimpse of possible recognizable things or places, but “human meaning” as Stevens would style it, remains juts out of reach.
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Ann Lauterbach on Brian Wood
CATEGORIES DEFY THEIR IMPERATIVES; edges are uneasy in new light: woodsmoke in air, smokey air, scent, cloud and, on the evening screen, video flames. This moves to the place of that as subjects come unbound from their syntax; names for things arc dismantled from their objects like so many ribbons, wrappings, strewn on the floor of history. Into this attenuated breach come questions of authenticity, belief: what is real? what true? We are implored: look again.
Look at what? We are asked to reconsider the nature of a frame, that it might be arbitrary, fugitive, less than full because closed. Or, more positively, chosen: this riddle of fingers, that ancient vessel, this scrap of tree. Or something we cannot quite identify because it has been pulled up close into our perceptual field to be re-construed, interpreted. The way an event, say, becomes a memory belonging to you, only yours. We know someone's body was present, braiding elsewhere with now. So the frame narrates space.
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