Glenn Brown’s latest exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler in Paris sees him finding inspiration in old master drawings that he takes apart or grafts together, amps up with incommensurable colors and untamable swathes of invented brushstrokes. “The brushstroke appears to be floating,” the artist says here in conversation with Ben Luke. “Marks fly off as if the energy of the body is so hyper that the space of the body is not enough to contain it, that it has to take in the space around it.” Putting flesh on the bones of figures made of just a few sketched lines, Brown leads a historical dialogue from the position of a 21st-century artist about what it’s like to be human.

THE ECSTASY OF GLENN BROWN
(excerpt from the essay by Lizzie Perrotte)

An anonymous 14th-century mystical text proposes that abandoning oneself in ecstasy in “the cloud of unknowing” can expand perception and relational being beyond human bounds. In the Altogether is a gathering of new paintings by Glenn Brown at Galerie Max Hetzler that unfolds a mystery of mattering with an ecstatic aesthetic that stimulates unknowing. Brown’s exhibition is intoxicating. There is a psychotropic overload of revving color and quivering surfaces. There is agitation and murmuration from works that speak in tongues. This is an uncanny resonance produced through Brown’s miraculous mixing and dubbing of pictorial references. Allusive titling amplifies the intense vibrations, invoking a hoard of spectral forms that time travel through the exhibition spaces as figures of speech, music, and literary references. There is a risk of vertigo in this virtual realm. Spatial coordinates are unmoored. It feels like a world turning upside down, spinning beyond human control.

The hand of Plastic Soul (2024) gestures fervently to orchestrate a ritual or performance. What does this floating gesture signify? Is it a promise or a threat? There is so much to consider. It could be conjuring air for a magic trick or ready to raise the dead. A fascinating swarm of dark brushstrokes gathers in its palm, opening a “fertile wound” or stigmata. Perhaps Plastic Soul shimmers through a fog of mattering as an after-effect of ancient ecstasy. These cold blue fingertips might belong to a Medieval saint who, once upon a time, reeled back in the pleasure and pain of transfiguration. Whatever the origin, the gesture is liberated from any stronghold of meaning or temporal context. The trembling hand is now in play, conducting the ecstatic aesthetic of the show. It gestures a wild tempo of painterly forces that surge and bloom through Brown’s works as sensorial events. Brown claimed: “I am trying to keep the viewers’ eyes moving, sliding and dancing across the surfaces of the work, like a piece of music by G.F. Handel.”

Sonnet Lover (2024) presents a spectral figure, masked in Venetian carnival costume who personifies the exhibition’s performative spirit and ecstatic aesthetic. A billowing cloud of black lines manifests a dancing energy; sinuous twirling that moves perhaps to the rhythms of Handel’s music. Brown crafted each flourishing gesture slowly with minute blended brushstrokes. His painting performs the illusion of a bravura sketch that entwines and choreographs imaginary drawings by Rembrandt and Tiepolo. The cloud of lines draws forth a mysterious Maestro who looks back over one shoulder as though “leading us on” to somewhere else; into the unknown. Brown overlaid an enigmatic title that transports thoughts further into a realm of poetic possibility. The sonnet, a popular form in the Baroque era, was celebrated for disrupting clear structures of meaning; for folding and unfolding images through labyrinths of connotation. In the 1590s, English Baroque poet John Donne, a lover and writer of sonnets, wrote The Ecstasy, a Metaphysical poem that celebrates an aesthetic of entanglement or all togetherness. Donne’s poetic language convolutes sense to unravel the ‘subtle knots’ of lovers who abandon themselves to become otherwise: Our souls (which to advance their state / ere gone out) hung “twixt her and me…”

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In collaboration with Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin | Paris | London | Marfa