Artweek

Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot
May 2001

Brian Bent at DiRT gallery

ArchitecTOUR  feb 24 - april 28, 2001

Think back to those romantic old cartoons, like the Sylvester-and-Tweety takeoff of Owl and the Pussycat, where one of them keeps singing “Moon River.”
There’s a giant moon hanging low on the horizon, it’s reflection in the black water a jumble of tiny white triangles. The old wooden docks and waterfront buildings are jaunty and stylized, lit by single yellow bulbs in a lighthearted film noir sensibility that instantly places the imagery in Post-Deco America. Brian Bent's architectural paintings of historical buildings read like a Mel Blanc cover of a classic Tatlin tune. If Tweety and the Pussycat revisited Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International or had a go at the old Stieglitz photos of the New York nighttime skyline, that could give some idea of Bent’s technique. Painterly but solid, with color fields overlapping the objects they qualify, Bent's work owes much to a style of animation based on hand-painted cells, showing more concern with expressivity than computor-generated hyperreality.
Bent’s treatment of a vertical apartment tower’s grid pattern evokes more of a bamboo forest than a concrete jungle. The square angles of the grid are softened by the thickly laid on strokes that build them, and the grid is all that there is of the building. It does not decorate a facade, it is the only structure. It is transparent and yet it is heavy, with the the complete weight of its own objecthood resting on those thick, black painted cross-beams. In another painting, an open city promenade area is bounded with more transparent architecture, and includes the most prominent of his human figures. What is intriguing about these figures is that they are drawn in the same organic, architectonic style of the buildings. Their stylized wardrobes are consistent with the retro setting, their faces obscured. They are painted thickly and transparent, revealing the wall against which they lean just as the buildings reveal the expanse of city or horizon behind them.
A third work presents a lateral view of a boulevard, with a grove of palm trees depicted in a similar painterly illustration mode. The appeal of Bent’s warm drawing style has to do with the way he encompasses art history in a pop culture vocabulary. What is really compelling about this approach is its consistency throughout the work. The essential sameness of all the basic structures of nature and architecture is made apparent. The idiom resonates as it takes the entire presentation of such utopian ideas back to a time that values human scale, individuality and picturesque geometry over hollow technical precision.

Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot
May 2001