Cecily Brown: Rehearsal (Drawing Papers) Paperback – November 22, 2016 by Cecily Brown (Artist), Claire Gilman (Contributor), David Salle (Contributor) (The Drawing Center)

“Untitled (Paradise),” 2014, by Cecily Brown, is part of “Rehearsal,” a show of this painter’s work at the Drawing Center.CreditCreditCourtesy of the artist


The London-born painter Cecily Brown is known for stormy, intensely colored canvases, usually abstract, which depend for their effect not on any overall argument or scheme but on a sheer profusion of rapid, discontinuous strokes.

They stand or fall according to some mysterious magic achieved by no one choice but by all of the artist’s choices together. Some are thin, some are earnest, some are charming, but whether you like them or not, what they really demonstrate is the power of repetition — a power on even clearer display in “Rehearsal,” an expansive tour of Ms. Brown’s drawing practice ably curated by Claire Gilman at the Drawing Center. (The title is a play on the Old French verb “rehercier,” meaning “to repeat something as a way of studying it.”)

For years, Ms. Brown has taken the images that stay with her and drawn them, not just once but again and again. Sometimes these images are the overwhelming examples of her predecessors, like the masterly 18th-century debauchery of William Hogarth’s painting “Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn” or the postmedieval, religiously-tinged excess of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Fight Between Carnival and Lent.” But she also plucks shimmering fragments out of the contaminated tide of sexual imagery that is a fact of modern life — and whether it’s the ecstatically endless variation of the unchanging act itself or the compulsive repetition of pornography, sex seems especially apropos.

One of the first drawings in the show, “Untitled (Sweetie),” is a sooty-gray watercolor showing two versions or sequential moments of a single sexual encounter between a naked man on his back and a woman in thigh-high stockings. On one side, the figures are mere outlines and the woman, with intricately feathered hair but only a gray bar for a face, stares directly at the viewer; on the other, everything is in shadow except her breastbone as she tilts her head to the side and turns her fully realized face away.

The fact that such pictures are all over the internet gives Ms. Brown a significant freedom: Whether she follows one leg with sinuous precision or taps her way around a shoulder with a flutter of quick jabs, she can’t interrupt our instant, unthinking recognition. At the same time, though, the contrast between these two versions of one encounter, if only by suggesting how differently the two participants likely experienced it, brings attention back to these overlooked details and awakens their emotional possibilities.
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Cecily Brown’s “Carnival and Lent (After Bruegel)” (2007), ink on paper.CreditCourtesy of the artist


Still, doubling has been familiar since the Victorian stereopticon (a View-Master precursor). It’s when you triple an image that things become strange. In each of Ms. Brown’s three included versions of that Hogarth painting, one a sketchbook study and two others each more than six feet wide, the same two little men in bear costumes reoccur. One man is cocking his right arm to punch his fellow in the ear, but his expression, each time, is different: Once, in watercolor and ink, he has the concentrated moral certainty of a surgeon; once, in sketchy pastel, he prepares with playfully innocent glee; and once, pushed back into shadow, he’s just a fat bully. These aren’t complementary shades of a single incident anymore — they’re alternate, incompatible, self-sufficient worlds.

But the eye can take in only so many of these. A serving dish of three fat pies, repeated several times in the elegantly brittle suite of nine ink drawings called “Carnival and Lent (After Bruegel),” looks as if it were lit by stroboscopic lightning strike — and after that, separate beats begin to run together.

“Untitled (After Bosch),” for example, an explosively colorful, landscape-format painting that looks like an oversize Bible opened straight to the Apocalypse, is full of hands. (It’s also full of blue waves, red vortices, black moons, brown brontosaurus necks, dots, drips, loops, dolphin noses and swooshes.) There’s a red hand with thumb extended and pointy fingers, like a bird’s wing, lying over a black one, thumb also extended, its fingers huddled and nervous; two more hands hold these two by the wrists, and yet another two burst out of a nearby egg shape. These repeated elements no longer seem separate or the same: They seem instead like appearances of some shamanic god who’s everywhere at once — insofar as it’s anywhere at all.

The final result of all this repetition — and I assume this has been as true for Ms. Brown when she made the drawings as it was for me as I viewed them — is that everything else falls away, even the object being looked at or the figure being drawn, and the activity of drawing itself is revealed in all its strange particularity.

A small ballpoint-and-ink drawing with blue and pink watercolor, “Untitled (Paradise),” shows Adam sitting in the middle of Eden listening with dopey pleasure as Eve relays to him her recent conversation with the serpent.

Around them wander a menagerie of animals displaying their artist’s preternaturally intelligent line. There’s a dignified rooster, a downcast lion with an anxious lioness, a greedy monkey, a self-satisfied ewe. And just out of the humans’ sight, as if waiting to appear after they’ve thoroughly chewed the forbidden fruit, are a zebra coming apart into meaningless stripes and a turkey gracefully dissolving like glitter on the surface of the sea.