PEARLESCENT

0 CommentsSunday • April 17, 2011 • by admin

an exhibition of new paintings by Marcy Brafman,

May 31 – June 27, 2011.

NY ART BEAT Review June-2011

Brafman’s  second solo show at 532 Gallery with a new body of work employing a variety of tools and motifs that were only half realized in previous creations. The title “PEARLESCENT” comes from the exploration of specialty formulations of One Shot Oil Enamel, the glossy, viscous fluid pigment used by sign painters and employed here with spray paint. Pearlescent, Fluorescent, Krylon, Montana Paint, and sometimes melted Crayolas, take on a form which is both extremely engaging but sticks to the repertoire she has popularized, of taking invisible icons and making them very overt, stylizing them with the medium and gestures of painterliness bordering on graffiti. These are paintings born of Jackson Pollock, the end of nature, comic strips, cartoons, rock n roll, black ops insignia, John Singer Sargent and a long toxic immersion in the living billboard of electronic and digital life. They are also mashed up with urban street poetry and American highway.

PEARLESCENT continues the artist’s exploration into the way symbols, signifiers, and half remembered gestures of the media landscape make up our collective psyche. The paintings of Marcy Brafman can be considered portraits of situations which are inherently symbolic, sometimes taking on symbol as icon, and mining it for humanistic traits mired in narrative that exist outside of fine arts but not outside of the human condition. Another painter might spend time trying to re-insert the symbol into the category or scenario from which it first appeared. But this might possibly obscure the symbol, obfuscating the process of discerning its efficacy and its inevitability. Instead, Brafman restates the symbol itself as a central esthetic event, as evidence of a gesture and its philosophical importance.

Truth or Consequences

0 CommentsThursday • May 15, 2008 • by admin

Marcy Brafman

May 15 – June 7, 2008

Marcy Brafman’s paintings deal with the dark and light of the cultural landscape and the nature of character. They reflect on the demons and deities of the memory as seen on our devices, online, on television, billboards, boxtops, catechisms, illustrated classic comic books, masterpieces in the Frick, old paperback covers, graffiti and signage on moving vehicles and packaging detritus of every shape and kind. Concern with brand identity as a genuine spiritual state plays a strong role in the work, an examination of painting as a mirror to internal and external states, individual and social intentions. Each painting represents a logo poem, a distillation of an array of ideas into a simple painted statement. Each one plays a character in a private cast alphabet.