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Cecily Brown

From:     CAP
Category: Art
Date:     06 January 2010
Time:     11:39 AM

Review:

When I look at the paintings of Cecily Brown , I find myself , for lack of anything to fall back on, 
imagining what it would be like to be Cecily Brown making the painting. It is now a familiar criticism of 
her work that she is unable to draw in the viewer. This because the pleasure accorded to the artist in 
making the painting is evidently greater than that of the viewer in looking at it. This is the opposite of 
say, Matisse, where the pleasure accorded to the viewer is greater than that accorded to the 
artist.She refuses to resolve her paintings in terms of the image, preferring a decorative dispersal of 
marks.At the same time the marks are driven by a kind of intentional determinacy, though leading 
nowhere except back toward the painting, so indeterminate in relation to everything except 
themselves.What does this add up to ?  A kind of all -over ( tick that modernist box) gestural 
solipsism grafted onto the most generalised sex 'n' sunflowers lyrical figure- in -landscape scenarios. 
They have the coyness of the onanist - masturbation writ large. She paints from the clit.


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