[exhibition review,  Stephen Bram at Anna Schwartz Gallery, March 2006]

TRACING HIDDEN LINES WHILST STANDING IN PERIPHERAL FIELDS.

In his recent solo exhibition at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Stephen Bram made further progress into the reiteration of concept over materiality. Within the 8 panoramic works exhibited, focus shifted further away from the physically immediate support of the painted object, towards a more archetypal investigation into space – of how it is staged by the artist, and how it is seen and perceived by the viewer. As discrete works they were dramatically large, yet still as standard and modular as those that have been made before them.

Bram’s new works concern themselves even less with the act of looking at a painting, instead, they are more involved with witnessing a situation, a wide, cinematic screen into a conceptual environment, a phenomenological perspective of elements receding into a spatial setting specifically designed for each work. As visual experiments, they are squarely aimed at one’s ability to see and comprehend; to do this in a way that we do everyday.

Bram’s large-scale paintings have now moved closer towards the wall paintings that the artist has been making for the past 10 years. The scale of these new works makes the relationship between image and viewer even more tangible. In perfectly applied forms of paint, crystalline elements echo an intersection with the painting surface. Following the principle of 1:1 scale, these painted planes are of the exact size that they are presented as. As abstract paintings they are very close to fact.

The exhibition read as a conversation of images that referenced two things simultaneously; one being the idea of how space behaves optically, the other being the general principles of the setting that they were exhibited within. But this is not to say that they reflected only the nature of gallery architecture. Even allowing for their enlargement, the paintings were of increased complexity. This heightened compositional activity may signal the artist’s observation of space as an arena for complex and multifarious occurrences. Painted space as a set of complex compositional decisions, and worldly space as a dynamic locus for public events. Details within each of the works could still be read individually and definitively, but upon wider viewing, they became more dependent upon their vanishing points for order.

With complexity comes ambiguity. And ambiguity allows for a more intuitive interaction. Within these new works, Bram’s invitation for an intuitive realisation was clear. In each case, a definite dialogue existed between the proportions of the stretched canvas and the spaces manipulated within it. Areas of close detail asked the viewer to make two-dimensional observations. Areas that contained expansive horizontal spaces provided for an illusionistic appreciation. These, and other perceptual ratios overlapped on countless occasions in each work throughout the show.

Ambiguity apportions the viewer the right to derive subjective meaning – in these situations the viewer was given the opportunity to recall their own notion of reality, as seen through Bram’s abstractions of it. In these works we see a development of a geometric abstraction that is at once both concrete and interactive, a hybrid of its history and theory. A form of modernism that has somehow traversed the multiplicity and choice of things on offer that is all things post-modern.

The paintings suggest an abstract representation, or a quotation of our world. Bram uses the rectilinear principles of architecture almost as a readymade, as an abbreviated subject matter. Such a transition allows for a popular interpretation of this subject matter, as the viewer makes ambient associations between their own world and the one embedded within the work. Yet the artist’s signatory colour schemes denied a retinal pop sensation. In each painting, Bram asks us to slow down and look properly.

So why are these works so perfectly painted?

Well, In the hope that they can be seen as colour only. So that colour is given shape and suggested place, not form that is immediate to the canvas surface. So that the viewer has the best possible chance of looking through them and into the work. Not at them specifically. 

Bram has adamantly insisted that his works are about nothing - of nothing related to nothing. But how does Bram actually make paintings if their subject matter and context is so completely reduced? I would suggest that Bram’s paintings result from specific points within a space that relates to nothing in the realistic sense. They are about points and lines that encompass the viewer, who is a witness to them by looking into the work. The relationships between points produce forms that are architectural, yet still resemble nothing in reality. Nothing can indeed become something if it is visualised.

Stephen Bram’s most recent exhibition of paintings offered these relationships, interactions, and occurrences. On view was a set of poetic representations derived subjectively from a limitless, conceptual space.

Above all, paintings are visual things, and Bram’s practice centres on the task of assembly in the visual sense. Of things that are wider than the normal, more peripheral than the actual. The paintings were ideas. Of space.

Justin Andrews