Envisioning Space, Past and Presence by Michael Wilson

Envisioning Space, Past and Presence

In the art of Kimberly Brooks, reality dances, tantalizingly, just out of reach. The interiors and landscapes of her paintings are lush, seductive, but impossible to occupy; while stocked with familiar aesthetic cues, they feel hallucinatory, displaced not only from the here and now but even from the historical circumstances they mimic. What Brooks depicts are not people and places but our fractured memories or visions of them; idealized and incomplete, they’re

closer to ghosts or visions than to reliable documents. Crossing and recrossing the line between figuration and abstraction—both in the transition from one body of work and another, and within individual pieces—Brooks distills the essence of moments past to transport us outside of lived time. Even when the figures depicted are those of her own family, or when the locations belong to shared narratives, they retain an air of fantasy.

“Fever Dreams” juxtaposes new large paintings by Brooks with smaller canvases and works on paper made over the past 15 years. Seen together, they underscore both a remarkable consistency and an ongoing, even accelerating, development in the artist’s practice as she moves from series to series, show to show. As subjects and materials shift in and out of focus, so larger thematic connections emerge; one might readily pair the work made for two exhibitions in 2007 and 2008, for example, both of which draw on the artist’s family history while approaching it with different emphases, and in subtly different styles. There are formal and atmospheric through lines, too; a love for the decorative and the architectural, for nature both wild and manicured, and for images within images, frames within frames.

The oil and gouache paintings that Brooks made for her exhibition “Mom’s Friends” at Taylor de Cordoba in Los Angeles, for example, riff on the formal conventions of their snapshot sources—their all-smiles subjects and artless compositions—to focus on the artist’s mother and her glamorous entourage. The images immerse us effortlessly in the stylish social whirl of 1960s and ’70s Marin County. But there’s more to the project than simple nostalgia; in their exclusion of men, they present an explicitly feminist take on identity politics, filtering ideas about the perceived role and status of women through the vicissitudes of memory. The following year’s “Technicolor Summer” at the same gallery also drew heavily on private albums, but in these works the jollity of vacationing is overshadowed by Brooks’s father having been diagnosed with a terminal illness, lending each recorded moment a particular emotional weight.

In both of these series, as in later works, Brooks’ light touch is key. Her brushwork is never too dense. Detail is kept in check, and there’s a sensitivity to pattern and surface. Yet far from emptying the work of content, this apparent airiness finally allows more space for conceptual and psychological nuance. In subsequent series, Brooks continues to fuse ornamental luxe, calme, et volupté with intellectual subtlety. “The Stylist Project” (2010), for example, is a set of portraits of fashion stylists and designers that was inspired in part by a lecture on the influence that two iconic figures from that world, Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, had on Henri Matisse. While their immediate visual realm is, then, that of haute couture, these paintings are ultimately concerned with the origins and dissemination of visual culture at large, with how it finds its way from creator to creator, audience to audience—sometimes across the boundaries of discipline. (Brooks occupied the same world in “Thread” at de Cordoba in 2011, continuing to interrogate female beauty and dress through a darker, slightly more abstracted take on portraiture.)

In more recent works, Brooks borrows even more explicitly from historical record, adapting scenes from time past while abstracting their documentary content just enough to allow for new, more playful interpretation. These are not, then, exercises in history painting per se, but something more ambiguous and atmospheric. As in the artist’s earlier works, rich clothing and grandiose architecture abound, but are again undercut by intimations of desire and loss, of beauty shadowed by the uncanny. Even relatively straightforward images that part-mirror actual individuals or events threaten to collapse back into pure mark-making. Try to place the fuzzedout faces of Prince or The Great Raj, for example, or locate either military strategy or blood-and-guts in the unexpectedly lovely synchrony of Ancient Battle. Through this kind of soft distortion, Brooks assembles a quiet critique of power, stressing her sources’ common ground by lending their iconography a near-universal register.

Broadly resonant too is Brooks’ use of gold and silver leaf, which made their first appearance in her work for 2017’s “Brazen” at Zevitas Marcus Gallery in Los Angeles. These materials—”genuine” yet literally superficial—offer a critique of wealth that’s also still half in love with its subject. Even in this form, there’s no denying the mystique of these metals, the sheen of fantasy that they bring to Brooks’ ceilings and portals, frames and altars; titles like Lightness of Being seem to underscore their dazzling effect. And there’s an echo in works such as Portrait Hall and Russian Room of the oneiric labyrinth that makes up the grand hotel in Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad, 1962), a comparable sense of romantic extravagance fatally undercut by melancholia.

Ultimately, even paintings themselves become props in Brooks’ conjured realm, signifiers of status and windows into different lives and times. The pictures rendered in Near and Far and Hall of Eternity, for example, occupy a self-reflexive world of images that acquire an unsettling equivalence with the interiors in which they hang. What part of this, if any, can be considered “real,” or is it all representation? (Answers: all of it, and yes.) There’s a Russian-doll feeling

to works like Remembrance that suggests we’re looking at just one part of an endless succession or cycle of depictions, and that we may never arrive at a final, definitive version. Brooks’ dream—one in which, typically, the concrete meets the ethereal, the image meets its distorted reflection—is one that recurs.

Michael Wilson

Brooklyn, 2018