BRIAN BRITTON
BOMBS AND BROKEN GLASS
April 28 to June 10 2023
Koop Projects
‘In a way their most extraordinary characteristic is that they are man-made. They distort all life and give no freedoms. Somehow, they give us no choice. Not a soul on earth wants them, yet, here they all are.”
- Martin Amis, Einstein’s Monsters.
“And if it’s not love then it’s the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb that will bring us together.”
– Ask, The Smiths.
With simplicity of design, detachment of tone and a paired down colour pallet Brian Britton shows artworks of warfare and destruction as well as peacetime and repair.
But why does an Artist paint bombs? And why especially, do they paint bombs devoid of any context that they themselves play out in? No immediate context of lives lost or irreparably shattered by their detonation.
In his work Brian Britton’s craftsmanship, the drawing and painting on beautiful mould-made paper, remains untroubled. A collision has been avoided. He has not needed to wear his life on his sleeve to keep his singular sensibility intact.
War as a kind of spectator event, a constant media backdrop, either in hot or cold form, can have a dream like aspect to it the longer it goes on. Over time, it can also have an oppressive tension for those who feel they might be closer than others to its grim, physical reality. In Brian Appleyard’s overview of the post war imagination the change to peacetime was noted as rapid. Ruins remained but the war itself “…had become Heritage. Odd. Distant, and sentimentally cherished. Its tools, deprived of function, became ornaments. Aides Memoires. Like snap shots or souvenirs.”
There is something of the feeling of this also in Brian’s Bombs.Traditional, Schematic, retro, a little bit cyberpunk, almost plutonic in form. And if passion is part of war, the passion in these Bombs is almost certainly, deliberately, going elsewhere. To retain some kind of context within the current landscape of conflict, largely witnessed from one step removed the bombs here are delicate, po faced, studio centric, and alchemic.
In 2014, after a year-long artistic meander with a head full of aesthetic ideas about Richard Dadd and Shakespeare’s Midsummers night dream an oblique challenge to his tranquillity, Brian arrived on the island of Patmos in Greece. There, a newspaper story about Queen Elizabeth II launching a new Navy Vessel, an expensive state of the art War ship both mesmerised and irked him. He drew boats in response. Lots of futuristic Battleships. Beautiful and bizarre designs. At the gallery is one simply exploding. Ink washes creating flashes of kinetic light. The source material of a newspaper war photo becomes a mini Helen Frankenheimer. Violent and frozen. “I wanted to destroy the destroyers” he said.
He also began to draw and paint the bombs. Neatly drawn and self-contained. A kind of “If you make yours. I will make mine” reaction to their presence. Perhaps transmuted into a line of extremely abstract “portraits”. The central body of each bomb a gently internally revolving head, balanced on its tails and its fins becoming a suit and collar. Picarbian CEOs at a mechanised factory’s boardroom.
A Triptych of missiles displayed at the show speaks more prosaically of these weapons. Highlighting plainly and directly what will be lost in any escalated exchange.
From the living - Birds, Fish, Insects. To the cultural – Symbols. Targets. Numbers.
This beautifully and clearly drawn work conveys less the doom and more the innocence of what is still widely present. There is a lightness of touch here.
And then there are the small collages. American landscapes which are breezily, beautifully documentary like, uncontained and optimistic. And the whimsical cutting and coupling of magazines from 1950’s, 60,s and 70,s America. This is a very different approach to making. Schooled and mediated but without a Dada-like irony or barbed political target in sight. No pop art brashness, but rather, a respectful and subtle highlighting of things as they were. A vast empty parking lot and a vast night sky. Modernism. Italy absorbed with much else of Europe; cultures within a desert landscape of new thought and opportunity. A refuge for peoples displaced. Illustrations of pragmatic penetrating minds and an inventive curious technology. Brian Britton’s work shows a close kinship with this landscape. A Tolerance and generosity of spirit.
Down below in the gallery, installations of broken glass reflect inner, rather than outer, spaces put back together again. A violent separation and artful resolution. An inner stability seems to have prevailed against events both real and intangible. Having avoided the consequences of direct conflict, Brian is a survivor of a very well lived peace time. The work seems to quietly speak of this survival.
To ask again why does an Artist paint bombs?
The answer may be that although they may sometimes seem to be simply a kind of arresting visual gloss, they are also a physical reminder of their lethal imposition. Perhaps more like a Jungian UFO, a symbol of the self - ‘There is energy here also.’