Installation at Afragola Train Station Designed by Zaha Hadid, Naples, Italy

Il Mattino, Napoli, Italy | May 9, 2023 | "Treasure Hunt," By Tiziana Tricarico

Paintings capable of projecting the gaze of the observer into another dimension, a world made of colors where the imagination allows us to expand the perceptive capacity of our senses.

“Infinite Imagination” is the title of the double solo exhibition by Gary Brewer and Aline Mare opening May 9, 2023 in the spaces of Art1307 (Rampe Sant'Antonio in Posillipo 104, 6-8pm). The exhibition, curated by Cynthia Penna, offers until 30 September the works of the two American artists, a couple in life but not in art - since each follows their own inspiration and has their own way of telling it. Their work is however united from a sense of magic, eros, the unknown, and myth. 

The two artists will also be the protagonists of an exhibition dedicated to the environment - again curated by Cynthia Penna and included in the “Traveling with Zaha” project conceived by Antonella Iovino-in the spaces of the Afragola high-speed station. 

Brewer's hyper-realistic paintings, charged with eroticism, are close-ups of the orchid's secret space: its radiant patterns and lush, sensual curves are an expression of beauty reminiscent of female genitalia. Portraits pulsating with life and energy. When he paints an orchid, the artist is fascinated by the complexity of its structure, which appears to be modeled by forces connected to the vast interconnection of the universe. Each of Brewer's works is a meditation on the uniqueness of each individual flower. Although similar in form, each of these images is a surprising expression of the infinite possibilities of life, of how everything in each moment is always new.

Aline Mare's work is a return to the myth and legend she has explored since her early years as a performance artist. Her works are digital compositions and mixed media: a hybrid form of painting, photography and installation that synthesizes the aesthetic sensibility of the artist who continues to delve into her journey of the female psyche. Mare reinterprets sculptural works from Greek and Roman antiquity, which she photographed during her recent travels in Europe, creating her own mythical narrative thanks to the superimposition of images of crystals, gold and other elements that suggest geological forces.

“Entwined Roots: Symbiotic Relationships” The Art of Aline Mare and Gary Brewer | Catalog essay

By Constance Mallinson

 Prior to the last fifty years women artists were recognized solely as invisible muses largely subservient to male artists.  A Darwinian triumph was essential to drive the tenets of artistic progress and success essential to its marketing. The mutual exchange of ideas, approaches and aesthetics was incompatible with that model. No longer able to withstand its contestable past, that paradigm has now collapsed with countless contemporary biographies now extolling the comparable geniuses in artist couples. The biographies of Dorothy Tanning and Max Ernst, Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning and Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell , Carl Andre and Anna Mendieta, to name a few, have been revised to reflect this equality and illuminate similarities and differences in their practices.

As part of this still unfolding narrative artists Gary Brewer and Aline Mare have been acknowledged for their distinctive but intimately related artworks created during their supportive 25 year relationship. They met in New York through an introduction by performance artist Carolee Schneemann at an art party. Aline was a performance/video artist from New York living in San Francisco, and Gary had come to New York seeking community as a reductive abstract painter. Increasingly dissatisfied and “disconnected with the excess” of 70’s and 80’s video performance culture and similarly driven by Brewer’s curiosity and enthusiasm for nature, literature, film and art, Mare began exploring “a quieter” painting and object making while Brewer’s work morphed from reductivism to incorporating imagery.  After several years spent in the Bay Area together where they could backpack in the redwoods and indulge their passion for nature, they settled in Los Angeles in 2013, completing their mature bodies of work (2015-2021) featured in this survey exhibition. There are many crosscurrents and intersections in their practices, most notably in their marriage of romanticism and science: nature imagery is ubiquitous but always immersed in lush atmospheric fields of pigment, whether in  Brewer’s pristinely rendered organic forms or in Mare’s photographically reproduced and hand colored natural detritus; digital imagery from NASA files is an important reference for Brewer’s painted abstractions derived from dark matter computer animations as it is for Mare who weaves outer space photography and images of natural disasters taken from satellites and diverse photographs into her hybrids of photography and painting. Such compositions point to the synchronism of the macrocosm with diverse microcosms and the two artists’ deep contemplation of the dimensions of human existence.  An erotics of painting permeates both their work: the pleasures of sheer beauty expressed in seductive veils of rich color, sensuous lines and organic forms infused with sexual and procreative innuendo. Their unapologetic embrace of beauty in the face of cultural cynicism and sublime threats of annihilation indicates the divine power of Venus and Mars are in constant play.

Several works from Mare’s 2018 book Requiem: Aching for Acker serve as elegies to her friend the poet Kathy Acker who died of cancer in 1997.  Mare’s perfected technique of synthesizing digital scanning processes and hand painting allowed for visceral photo images such as hearts, fleshy torsos and limbs, skeletal forms, cellular shapes to be suffused with painterly evocations of blood, rot, surgery, and decay. These are deftly intermingled with artifacts and textual fragments from Acker’s life and poems. As if acknowledging its insufficiencies and inadequacies to fully express and comprehend momentous life events, Mare seems to regard the photograph as merely the objective ground or material aspect of existence in need of subjective augmentation. A melding of phenomenology with ontology, such approaches are described by art historian Simon Schama as an “excavation below our conventional sight level to recover the veins of myth and memory that lie beneath the surface.” Moreover the technical reproducibility of photography and its” loss of aura” as described by Walter Benjamin, is subverted, its aura as a unique artwork regained by her personal mark making and layered paint strokes. When infiltrated with smokey translucent mists, textural marks, and vaporous spectral forms, the experience is heightened dramatically to suggest powerful raw emotions, memories, hints at ethereality and transcendence, the mystical and magical. Rather than gloomy or melancholic, these works exist in the gaps between disappearance and rebirth, the tone instead celebratory. They are nothing short of visionary in their reach.

Similarly, more recent works created with dye infused metal from the Angle of Repose Series (2017) and the ongoing Cloud Seeds Series continue this inquiry. Here the current state of the natural world is the primary focus. Imagery of seed pods, flowers, fungi, tangled roots, branches, fossils, and soft clouds of twig flecked kapok (a cotton like substance from the kapok tree) is suspended within multi-dimensional atmospheric spaces referencing skies, land, water or extreme weather patterns. Transparent abstract painted passages intermingle with detailed depictions of natural detritus to lessen the totalizing effects of illusion. Delicate filaments emanating from the organic materials simultaneously mimic microscopic forms as well as celestial bodies; these wispy threads seem to communicate between organisms like underground roots in tree communities. Dazzling cerulean skies, cadmium orange poppies, and magenta petals contrast with the rich umbers of soil and matted decaying plant material to suggest cycles of life and death. While such pairings can be read for allegorical or symbolic significance regarding cultural and environmental decline, they also are conveyed as creative, even fecund, a dynamic of change and renewal as opposed to dire warnings of collapse. Subtle scratches in the surfaces create an electrifying static charge or force fields throughout that align Mare with American painter Charles Burchfield’s (1893-1967) near hallucinogenic, ravishing natural worlds buzzing with seen and unseen life forces. Like Burchfield, Mare weaves a grand narrative of connectedness, transforming the landscape into mysterious luminous realms where communion with nature, as the 19th century essayists Thoreau and Emerson believed, is the conduit to enlightened consciousness. Still other artworks in the exhibition use installation approaches to combine actual materials like salt crystals in combination with the photographs to conjoin the physical and spiritual and to signify the healing power of art. Assertively neo-Romantic in their yearnings, such intensified and highly aesthetic engagements with our natural surroundings awaken imaginative, critical strategies for preservation and the production of philosophical thought crucial to understanding contemporary existence.

Like Mare, Brewer draws profound metaphors concerning the coherence between the human and non-human world but purely through the paint medium. Growing up in Lancaster California as the son of a test pilot and engineer for the Apollo mission, his love of the outdoors was expanded by modern dreams of space travel, evidenced today in his meticulous botanical studies and their implied connections to the cosmos. Although he drew passionately in his youth, he came later to painting without the conventional art school training, perhaps accounting for his stated need to prove he could achieve perfection as a painter. Brewer’s technical achievements are on full display in the exquisitely rendered, hyper-realist orchids, lichens, mosses, and glistening corals floating freely in radiant fields of prismatic color or set against net-like draped backdrops filled with irregular abstract shapes sourced from deep space Hubble telescope imagery. Manipulations in scale and enlargements to near cinematic proportions, vivid high contrast colorations and vast spatial references conjure 19th century landscapist and painter of exotic flora and fauna Martin Johnson Heade meeting 20th century Minimalist Robert Irwin channeling Disney animation.   As the Surrealists bent and shaped the recognizable into alternate realities—think Max Ernst’s alien landscapes and Dali’s warped objects-- Brewer’s oversized florals and fungi can veer into anthropomorphic, supernatural or monstrous forms, beautiful and horrifying at once.  Matter at its most infinitesimal, delicate, and wonderous coexists with the terrifyingly limitless and expanding universe, blending the traditional Kantian opposites of beauty and the sublime. Binaries dissolve as Brewer reveals the coincidences, infinite convergences and interdependencies circulating in the biosphere and the universe: the topography of a glistening coral fragment magnified hundreds of times is surprisingly similar to  gas clouds billions of miles tall;  gold nuggets resemble space matter; plants correspond to underwater animal life as well as galactic events;  cellular structures with their swirling DNA helixes are duplicated throughout earth and beyond to link the origins of organic and inorganic life. Such synchronicities beg scientific examination but also spiritual and philosophical debates. We are reminded of the Sufi doctrine that to understand the cosmos will instantly lead to awareness of one’s condition. As ecological threats and a global environmental crisis give rise to dystopian fears, Modernist notions of progress are being revised to effect change. The invention of new aesthetic directions seems less critical to Brewer than revitalizing and engaging ancient and contemporary existential questions in order to shape and renew human experience.

 In the most recent paintings (2018-2020) Brewer has eliminated identifiable imagery in favor of biomorphic abstractions composed of near phosphorescent, amoeba-like configurations based on NASA’s renditions of black holes and dark matter. The sensation is fluid and dreamy,  alluding to altered states of mind.  While his abstractions flirt with figuration, his use of sumptuous ultramarines, ambers viridians and violets is intuitive, emotive, and less dependent on accurate description than in earlier paintings. He attributes his vibrant color choices to a kind of synesthesia inspired by a wide range of music he listens to as he paints. However he has not abandoned his interest in exploring the cosmogenous mirroring of structural forms and the origins and boundaries of the human imagination. For Brewer, similarities in evolution seem mysteriously organized, perhaps according to the Gaia hypothesis of deep ecology as well as the laws of physics. Now that scientists have discovered electromagnetic relations exist between the brain and earth as a kind of planetary consciousness, Brewer’s conceptual model of the world unifying physical and spiritual dimensions pairs the poet with the scientist. Together with Mare, they propose a beautiful theory of everything.

Gary Brewer: Infinite Morphologies at Marie Baldwin Gallery | Art and Cake

By Betty Ann Brown

“Habituated to the Vast”
—Samuel Coleridge

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Gary Brewer is an astonishingly gifted painter who creates visual juxtapositions that are both intimate and awesome. Several of his 2017-2018 works continue the pictorial vocabulary he has employed previously: fastidiously detailed depictions of Phalaenopsis or “Moth” orchids, with their glorious and sometimes surreal shapes and surfaces; red coral limned to emphasize its almost muscular striations; ghostly, convoluted coral skeletons; and shimmering curvilinear shapes that echo scientific depictions of dark matter, the hypothetical energy/material believed to comprise up to 85% of the universe. While the orchids, coral, and skeletons are earth-bound and small in size, the dark matter is vast beyond imagining. In pairing precise images of organic entities with riffs on scientific imaginings of infinite space, Brewer engages the historic binaries of earth vs. heaven or body vs. soul that have been fundamental to Western culture. And he does so with a resonant sense of wonder.

Brewer is postmodern in his elision of conceptual oppositions. The orchids are rendered with the exactitude of botanical illustrations. In contrast to these tight, almost photographic depictions, the painted backgrounds present swirling, amorphous, often translucent realms. The scale shifts are remarkable: Tiny blossoms loom over the cloudy nebulae that explode into immense space.

Brewer’s work also echoes Romanticism’s quest for the sublime. In 1757, British critic Edmund Burke began to use the term “sublime” to refer to the awe and terror experienced in our encounters with massive mountains, violent storms, and volcanic eruptions. (The European Romantics were reminded of nature’s life-threatening power by the 1748 discovery of Pompeii, a vibrant Roman city completely ravaged by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Vesuvius erupted six times in the eighteenth century; British painter Joseph Wright of Derby painted it frequently.) In today’s era of global warming, as hurricanes, typhoons, and tornadoes lash at our coasts and fires rage through our forests, we are similarly–and often painfully–made aware of nature’s destructive power.

Gary Brewer lifts the sublimity of nature to a poetic, metaphysical level. We can appreciate his paintings on a totally formal level: The technique is exquisite, with his wet-into-wet painting creating intriguingly blurred contours: His colors are rich and varied; His shifts in scale and focus are always engaging. Beyond the formal, Brewer explores the transcendence of our existence. We may be minute specks of carbon spinning through space on a relatively small rock-and-water planet. But as we look out at the almost inconceivable expanses of the universe, each of us also holds all of it inside of our awareness.

For this writer, the most exciting examples in Brewer’s current exhibition are the large paintings that eliminate both flowers and corals in order to to shift perspective toward the vastness of space. Pieces like Ultraviolet Mystery (60″ x 48″, 2018), Metaphoric Fire (84″ x 30″, 2018), and Gravity’s Rainbow (84″ x 30″, also 2018) are notable for their scale and for their lush, varied palettes. (Oh! Those blues! Those oranges!) Their soaring uplift is seductive. They function as pictorial abstractions–the dark matter allusions aside–and their almost human scale invites viewers into a phenomenological encounter. (Here I am thinking about the work of French twentieth century philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who analyzed the “primacy of perception.”)

Brewer engages the multivalent range of our experiences with nature. We can hold orchids in the palms of our hands. They are grown in greenhouses, genetically manipulated, and sold at grocery stores. In a sense, they represent how nature can be controlled by humans. But space is beyond our control: It exists on a scale that we are only beginning to understand, much less master.

In 1781, British Romantic scientist William Herschel built a large telescope that multiplied our understanding of the immensity of space. Studying the night skies with his newly designed device, he was the first to see Uranus. Herschel’s discoveries prompted British poet Samuel Coleridge to refer to the moon, planets, and stars throughout his oeuvre. The title for this essay comes from one of the poet’s letters. Like Coleridge, Brewer engages the sublime vastness of nature, as well as our fragile place within it.

 Marie Baldwin Gallery
https://www.mariebaldwingallery.com

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Marie Baldwin Gallery: Gary Brewer | Artillery

by Cooper Johnson

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Almost always, recognizing something as “beautiful” comes automatically, instantly—handed to you by a long function of evolution, culture and memory. Yet, at much slower rate, observation can generate a more conscious kind of awe, especially in nature, where hidden order unravels infinitely inward.

Through both of these perspectives, Gary Brewer seeks an aesthetic on the periphery of our understanding of the natural world. For example, in his latest show, “Infinite Morphologies,” Brewer paints coral, orchids and other vaguely organic objects adrift in billowy and translucent abstract forms.

If his goal is to prompt questions about the evolution and universality of natural forms, Brewer’s selection of objects is particularly effective. Brewer culls forms from micro- and macroscopic environments and pairs easily-identifiable objects with more ambiguous ones, illuminating curious similarities between disparate forms.

The backgrounds in these paintings, according to Brewer, are based on imaging of dark matter, which would fit well into his theme of universality. It’s unclear whether Brewer intended to communicate this through the work, but it seems unlikely that the viewer could understand it without a hint. The backgrounds of his paintings still work, though, as their colors and contours echo the figures in the foregrounds.

In some of these paintings, Brewer includes only these background forms, and experiments with higher color contrasts. But Brewer is at his best with works like The Emergence of Form and Radiant Sublime, which—by including the foreground objects—display a fuller range of Brewer’s technical abilities and provide better arguments for his commentary on universal forms.

Brewer picks an interesting time to focus on questions of beauty in the natural world. Nature may be art’s oldest subject, but the contemporary art world seems increasingly less interested in questions of beauty, whether by literal representations of nature or by attempts to recombine its patterns to evoke those elusive “automatic” responses.

Admittedly, if slow forces like evolution, culture and memory limit us to what we automatically find beautiful, perhaps art’s challenge is in presenting a new value system to match our exponentially complicating world. But Brewer raises, implicitly, a persuasive response: for every question answered about the natural world, a new, potentially deeper one takes its place.

Gary Brewer, “Infinite Morphologies,” January 6 – February 3, 2019, at Marie Baldwin Gallery, 814 S. Spring Street, Suite 2, Los Angeles, CA 90014. www.mariebaldwingallery.com

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