A
n erotically-charged spectacle spanning over six feet in width, Cecily Brown’s One Touch of Venus is a sensational exploration of the artist’s supreme mastery of gestural abstraction. Executed in 1999 and held in the same private collection since that very same year, the present work is entirely fresh to market. A tour de force of expressive markmaking, One Touch of Venus powerfully embodies the seductive fusion of rich abstraction and figurative allusion that has come to define Brown’s thirty-year long oeuvre. Immersing the viewer in a mesmerizing choreography of bubblegum pinks, fuchsias, and magentas, One Touch of Venus erupts in a cacophony of sumptuous color and movement, offering an enticing glimpse onto an unknown scene before evanescing into sheer painterly energy. The viewer is confronted by colliding pigment, forming a composition that is in a continual state of flux. Glimpses of undulating nude bodies mingle with broken rhythms of smaller brushstrokes, melting and morphing into the topography of Brown’s brushwork before vanishing altogether. Though she obfuscates any semblance of a clear narrative, her tactile handling of paint nevertheless commands the elusive power of suggestion, imbuing the work with a unique ebb and flow of chaotic sexuality.
At the time, Brown borrowed the titles for her paintings from films and plays but crafts her own narrative—this painting’s title derives from the 1948 musical comedy film One Touch of Venus. Lifting the title of the film only as inspiration, the resultant canvas is a composition of Brown’s entirely – one both inspired by art historical precedent and informed by her own contemporary perspective.
Viewers can readily discern the present work’s resonance with a multiplicity of art historical references. From the Baroque hedonism of Peter Paul Rubens’ Bacchanalia, and the lush, volatile brushwork of Chaim Soutine’s Still Life with Rayfish to the fragmentation of forms in Paul Cézanne’s Large Bathers and the chaotic carnivalesque of Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, Brown’s One Touch of Venus evokes the vernacular of legendary painters across the history of art, abstracting her forms all the while retaining the grand narrative impact of her forebears.
Right: Chaim Soutine, Still Life with Rayfish, ca. 1924, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK.
“The higher order of compositional organization in Brown’s work references the grand tradition of theatrical landscapes filled with figures allegorical, historical, or observed. […] She engages with her sources as if in a lover’s provocation to another touch, another exchange, excitement rising with response at the level of the mark, swatch, line of the brush drawn through the wet paint.”
Yet, Brown’s visual language is perhaps most evidently informed by the gestural mark-making of the celebrated American Abstract Expressionists. Like her predecessors, Brown’s dynamic brushstrokes engage the language of painting itself, expressing both the sensuality of the medium and its ability to playfully manipulate the viewer’s perception through its expressive possibilities. Evoking the expressive corporeality of Willem de Kooning’s Women, the present work ambiguously hints at fleshy, bodily elements; slippages of paint across the canvas loosely delineate nude forms, a face, an arm, and a pair of legs. Indeed, Brown’s bold use of pink and red hues and thick impasto in the present are an affirmation of de Kooning’s famous mantra that "flesh was the reason oil paint was invented.” Brown herself has described the medium as: "sensual, it moves, it catches the light, it’s great for skin and flesh and heft and meat … I wanted to make something that you couldn’t tear your eyes away from" (Cecily Brown cited in: Derek Peck, ‘New York Minute: Cecily Brown’, Another, September 14, 2012, online). There is no hint of moderation here, no sense of timid restraint. Each stroke of paint cavorts across the canvas, delighting in its own seeming excess; piles of paint and indulgent, smeared forms, reminiscent of the gestural mark-making of Arshile Gorky, suggest a kaleidoscope of pleasure and passion. Small areas of black paint evoke orifices, a coy and welcoming retreat for the eye from the thrilling riot of color.
Widely regarded as one of the most skilled and experimental artists of her generation, Brown carries forward the torch of Abstract Expressionism and brandishes it with her own contemporary perspective. In her own highly unique approach to abstraction, Brown fractures and buries her corporeal imagery and any semblance of a narrative in a vortex of frenetic strokes and scrapes. Like an artistic game of hide-and-seek, the search for visual clues in the maelstrom of pink paint highlights the ethos of Brown's work, whereby the act of looking converges with the voyeuristic pleasure elicited by her mysterious, abstract representation of the human body. “I think that painting is a kind of alchemy,” says Brown, “The paint is transformed into image, and paint and image transform themselves into a third and new thing.” (Cecily Brown quoted in Klaus Kertess, Cecily Brown, Gagosian Gallery and Rizzoli, 2008, P.16) A riotous dreamscape punctuated with fleeting moments of visual clarity, One Touch of Venus is a sensational example of Brown’s nuanced dance between abstraction and figuration, reality and fantasy, mystery and seduction.
Brown is currently the subject of a major career survey Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The exhibition, on view through December 2023, brings together fifty paintings, drawings, sketchbooks and monotypes to explore themes central to her practice. The first museum show of her work in New York since she moved there from London in the 1990s, Death and the Maid follows a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions in 2022, including Cecily Brown: Dream Spaces at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, and The Triumph of Death at Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples.
