Mediating Abstraction
Patrick Brien @ ThreeSquared
Published by Art Now Nashville, March 31, 2012
By Ryder Richards
“I am left with only impressions of the architecture… the most important thing is to feel the city.” ~ Walter Benjamin
With several paintings on temporary display at Three Squared Patrick Brien offers Nashville a series of well-executed, tightly themed architectural abstractions. Subdued in color palette, the formal compositions primarily feature compositional interplay between figure and ground, often with a singular architectural mass. Strongly delineated by line work, this structural entity at once maintains form while denying a plausible reality. This primary shape has a direct influence on neighboring shapes, overlapping and subverting their color schemes.
Strongly graphic in composition, the temptation to see beyond the merely formal shapes is rewarded upon close inspection: Brien occasionally scrapes areas of opaque paint aside revealing a density of delicate layers highlighting a surprisingly warm coloration and diagrammatic line work, as if exposing the warm skin and inspiration beneath the facade. Knowing the painting’s foundations are architectural ideograms, each piece begins in a precise, rational language of creativity where precision is paramount, yet the language is partially eradicated as the composition moves forward taking on an identity as a hierarchy of form must be established, lending each work a tactile, personalized feeling at odds with the cold Euclidian geometry of schematics.