Cecily Brown

It is voyeuristic and exhibitionistic. It is self consciousness and fucking off self consciousness, caring profoundly and then not caring at all. 

The canvases are big-high-spirited eruptions, flesh explosions. They are beautiful and vile, gorgeous and disgusting, good and evil all at once - -to see one without the other is to miss the picture entirely. 

They are in constant motion, pushing and pulling, attacking and retreating, playing a permanent peek-a-boo. Moving in and out of abstraction, they are visual puzzles, puns. Every time you look, the paint-ings are different, they fracture depending on the focus of your eye, your mental state, whether you are reading a discrete passage or taking on the entirety of the canvas. Each one is a movie, a true motion picture, build-ing up and breaking down. There are constant changes in perspective, in tempo. One image/impulse begets the next, mutating, morphing, becoming something else entirely; a knobby knee becomes a dog's head and then two people fucking. An enormous cock seems to rise and then disappear, but then maybe it wasn't a cock, maybe you are just deeply perverted and it was a vase of flowers, a woman's leg, an abstract form.

And sometimes it is about something barely there, the minimum of information, something turned inward. The canvas pushed past full color, now ashen, bleached, fainting, fading in and fading out. Cleaving, a great gap, a crevice opens, things flood in. There is the damp stain of the artist's body pressed to the canvas-in heat. And then there is dark, charcoal black, like kohl, like mascara, smeared, smudged-some strange sooty trouble.

It is everything from the inside out, a cool membrane, like acetate anatomy pages piling up, building a person, arteries and organs, the surface of the skin, the peel of an onion.

It is about layers, stratum and substratum, a fold, a flap, a fly unzipped. This is action-figure painting-a hybrid of art history and cartoon history. They are like comic book images picked up with Silly Putty, stretched, pulled into extreme and grotesque expressions, bent into unnatural positions. It is as if Marge and Homer Simpson were the models and Felix the Cat sat as their house pet. The putrid pallor of cartoon characters and animated fantasies becomes the pallet for portraits of a new century where flesh has no bounds, lust and aggression make amends and the incorpo-real mass of the body is atom smashed, etherized.

They are disruptive upchucks, undeniably echoing, hurling, the colors, the strokes, the gestures of de Kooning, Bacon, Pollock, Guston. They are not so much quoting or appropriating, as repeating, refluxing on the history of art once digested, now rising up, the riches, the flavors, fabulously familiar.