The Practice of Storytelling: Abstracted Narratives in the Work of Frank Bramblett by Denise Carvalho

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An artist is a man who can draw and paint everything. —Tolstoy According to Tolstoy, an artist can paint from a subject, an object, or his imagination and reach a universal language, a language that encompasses everything and transforms it into visual poetry, into the reminiscences of the artist’s soul. This interpretation of everything as a universal language is based on the existence of a system of internal relations in the language of arts and the notion of “art for art’s sake,” which is an analogy to the expression “poetry for poetry’s sake,” used as the title of an essay by A. C. Bradley. A successful painting can contain “everything.” As Rudolf Arnheim expresses, “All things seem to resemble each other. Sky, sea, ground, trees, and human figures begin to look as though they were made of one and the same substance, which falsifies the nature of nothing but re-creates everything by subjecting it to the unifying power of the great artist.” This is also the system of Frank Bramblett’s abstract language: Forms and colors express something even more profound than representational objects or subjects, going beyond mere allegory. Frank Bramblett’s paintings are not abstractions but abstracted narratives. They convey a system in which form and color parallel language, as in a landscape of abstraction. His paintings can transport the “everything” abstracted from the kaleidoscope of his soul to the picture plane. His language is simple and direct, apparently effortless, even playful, but profoundly engaging—a language that requests reflection and thought. Bramblett formulates his own laws of duality, multiplicity, and relativity. His paintings juxtapose predictability and unpredictability, light and dark, micro and macro, outside and inside, general and specific, dynamic and static, noise and silence, focus and diffusion. But these paintings go further yet with their layering of imagery. Similar to patterning, they reflect the complexities beneath the brushwork, such as the use of contrasting qualities between delicate forms of soft edges interlacing vital tones, or an overall tendency toward a harmonious, pattern-oriented imagery, suddenly interrupted by changes in design, color, or compositional structure that disrupt the pattern. Clearly the product of a mature artist, Bramblett’s paintings are fresh, different from other works claimed as proponents of “new languages,” works that artificially try to reinvent themselves. They are not allegories or representations of any subject, object, or history, neither interpretations of Euclidean geometry nor forecasters of new tendencies in painting. On the contrary, they are an existential result of new cultural and aesthetic tendencies, abstracting everything from an object to a situation, without negating the fact that they grew out of tradition, out of knowing painting’s formal histories in depth, and of experiencing through the years, their incorporation in the painted language’s calligraphic dispositions. These paintings are also memoirs of subjective experience, with its vibrant application of colors and shades, presented on a huge scale (90" by 72"), as well as a continuously imaginative flow of forms and metaphors, or metaforms—either way a result of the artist’s passion. The uniformity between color and form in Bramblett’s process becomes the synthesis of action and thought. His subjects can be derived from the objective realm, from experience, from memories, or from texts—some written by the artist himself—but once they are subjected to the laws of painting, according to the artist’s sensibility, they transcend paint, color, and form. Another important aspect of Bramblett’s work is multiple layers of space created by overlapping form over form, interlacing negative and positive shapes, and interplaying form and background, as if they were one and the same, and producing an overflow of rhythms and tones, of luscious colors and textures, reinforcing the values of subliminal correspondence within sensory experience. In Bramblett’s recent work, I recognized something new with a sense of déjà vu, as one does in seeing a newborn baby new to this world but filled with heritage from past histories and existences. Many of these new works demonstrate an affinity with scientific and mathematical languages, such as cybernetics—and genetics in the field of biology. I think of Marshall McLuhan forty years ago, stressing changes in our cultural perception because of the influence of technology, particularly television, as something that only now is beginning to infiltrate mass consciousness. Technology has moved our communications toward an expansion and multiplicity of information and reception channels—too many central stations broadcasting simultaneously while maintaining independent functions, which, contradictory to expectations and results, are interdependent in their functional outcome. In this web mentality, megastructures and institutions play an important role in embracing a system in which fragmented performances become a pattern of reality, and where each fragment is nothing more than an abstract sense of the truth. In this light, multiplicity is addressed in a temporal rather than spatial manner, as we experience when using the Internet, with its multiple links directing the viewer through virtual spaces in a fragmented sense of time. Time and space become a notion of the abstract, and we experience a sense of metareality. This changing perception of the real has also influenced our cultural system, represented by the media-cultures, and that apparently influences our art languages—or is it the other way around? Perhaps the gap created between a continuous and rapid technological development and unsettling cultural, social, and political dispositions has affected our sense of time in the history of art, provoking changes in notions and values that are yet to be validated. Frank Bramblett’s paintings comment on today’s changes. In fact, they reflect these fragmented patterns of a world flooded with visual information. What is relevant and new is his commentary on a multidisplacement of spatial and narrative structures, paradoxically nonlinear and continuous at once. Overflowing from each canvas is a unique “abstracted” imagery, resembling a pattern of repetitive shapes and colors, like landscapes of subjective abstraction, redefining the notion of representation. These paintings are directly connected to our postmodern experience, particularly in big centers such as in New York, reflecting the simulacra, with its hybrid images and cultures so largely manifested through cultural industries and through a primarily visual reconstruction of space. Whether we want them or not, these technocultural icons become the lens of daily reality, with its spectacular light and grandiose scale, somehow distorted, somehow changed. And Bramblett’s paintings absorb this megastructure—this organic flow of synthetic elements, this dynamic force of the visual spectrum—and re-creates its rhythm, its sounds, its colors and contrasts, its blinding light, its constantly changing imagery, its dual sides of despair and abundance, of quick-paced visual information and superficial assimilation versus a neverending organic flow. Even the titles of the paintings change as the artist finds new connections or experiences new feelings, which become intrinsic in the picture. As in Razzmatazz (2000), which is now eyedotcom, circles of different sizes, colors, intensities, etc., overlap and juxtapose each other, creating an effect of multiple planes, as in meanders and fractals, conceiving space in its infinitesimal subdivisions, although, here, it is in a much more subjective terrain. The different approaches used to paint each circle demonstrate that each has its own macrocosm, although they all play a part in the larger universal order. A partner to eyedotcom is Ogle. Not intended as a pair, according to the artist, they evolved that way as an addition. The same subjective impulse that makes the artist choose his brush strokes and subjects also determines the transmutability of titles or links to other works. Ogle’s imagery went through many transformations during its painting process, including its title, which changed to Tête-à-tête, after the finished product. It started as a flux of oval forms with spirals of wax displaced on the canvas, appearing as faces with ears, eyes, and mouths. Then, the artist scraped the painting with a floor brush, and created rhythmic spiral designs with the top tooth of a saw. In a continuous movement, he painted with his fingers, spray paint, and drip paint, and added layers of black and blue wax, which, later, he painted in white. As they changed, these oval forms started to resemble African masks. This process illustrates what seems to be a line of thought among many of Bramblett’s works: What appears as tangible reveals itself to be alterable, and what suggests the abstract and ephemeral now appears structured. The majority of his paintings are distinct in subject and process. They create a broken narrative when purposely shown side by side, attempting an effect of awe, or the sensation one may have on the edge of rupture or chaos. Bramblett’s paintings express not excess but abundance. They confirm a surprisingly imaginative order in chaos, as a paradigm of a mathematical system of some sort, as fractals, or as analogues to everlasting and random natural growth. This organism is also connected to the medium of painting. This is why his paintings are not representing the outdoors of spectacle but abstracting nature and sublimating it through painting. His paintings are elusive, yet not evasive. There is a certain utopian quality in the paintings’ transcendental character, connected, perhaps, to Frye’s theory of romance as the utopian idea of transformation of ordinary reality. As he states: “The quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality. ” As its own system of integers, or an integration of contradictions, Bramblett’s language of forms and colors create a half-organic, half-synthetic flux that suggests the possibility of a new flexible structure, whose aim is to redefine itself constantly. In the abstract world of these paintings, everything is relative, from the indication of a system of patterns to the switching from symmetrical to asymmetrical spatial dispositions. It is the visual world of ambiguities and paradoxes in display, as a laboratory of language structures assimilated through painting. Of course, painting is confirming its own terrain as a language structure without denying its correlation to the world of language, from which narrative structures are taken. My own experience in dealing with words and their ever mutable and transitory character comes to mind. In Louis Lambert, Balzac expressed: “The mere consideration of a word, even if we abstract its functions, its effects, its performance, is sufficient to launch us on a wide expanse of meditation.” As Bramblett’s forms and colors abstract from the world, words also absorb from and return to the world. In a finished text, words appear unchanged, coexisting in the text’s structure, although during the process of construction and reconstruction, words are as vulnerable to change and meaning. Substituting a word can change the whole flow and direction of the text. Each of the paintings is autonomous or can be part of an integrating language system: the language of differences. Perhaps, here, Bramblett’s work gathers cultural and sociopolitical influences, reflecting the various possibilities of globalized realities, the multiple gazes and sensibilities that do not represent generality but determine new considerations in relation to the system of integers that form the whole, in relation to languages and systems of all kinds. The more formal aspect of Bramblett’s work is concentrated in two important parts: first, in the process of his medium, accomplished in a direct and playful manner, maintaining a certain expressive attitude (somehow imbued by the lessons of the abstract expressionists); second, the artist’s awareness of how the hermetic qualities of materials and pigments function to promote balance and lightness, even when the images pour abundantly toward the edge of the canvas. In this way, his work may refer, as an afterthought, to Whistler’s: painting as its own language, as its own reality, with its own phenomenological capacities evolved from the process of abundance contrasting the vast spaces of paint—the horizons of “nothingness” of Whistler’s Nocturnes. Abundance, here, speaks of paint and its exploration and expression in space. Whistler’s abundance refers to his vision of an abstract space beyond the application of forms. Both artists envisioned the multidimensionality of space in the picture plane, not as a window for the imagination of the viewer but as a reality in the language of painting and as a reality in the expression of the world. Mind Mine (1997–98) is a large mixed-media painting in which clouds and luminous red and pink dots float on the surface of the painting, contrasting a polished graphite background, evoking the ephemeral aspect of time in relation to the emptiness of the open space. Holes in the canvas (difficult to detect from a distance) tell, in Braille, another story: of Seymour Cray, the mastermind behind Cray’s supercomputers, and his desperate search for analytical enlightenment in the process of inverting size and distance to speed and energy. This story also illuminates, in the painting, the process of transference happening in the void between planes of thought and experience. As a separate sphere of thought and as an attempt to overcome complex analytical problems, says the artist, “Cray dug a three foot by six foot by six inch deep recess in the wall of his basement. Over the years, the process has rewarded him with a tunnel thousands of feet in length.” This story is one of the narratives inherent in the painting. Other narratives were, perhaps, more subliminally conveyed. The juxtaposed recognizable and nonrecognizable images suggest the interlacing of form as an abstracted construction of painting, and of meaning as an abstracted construction of language. Even the title plays with the illusory aspect of words and their signifiers: Mind Mine may suggest the existence of painting as a transcending mind, becoming its own mind, or parallel universes of the world’s mind and the painter’s mind. Mind mine, mind of mine, mine in mind, mindless mine, and so on, is humorous in its proliferating and morphing of structures, in its interchangeability of meanings, where thoughts become anything from dust to cloud and colors and shapes from berries to DNA, all transformable through a visual extravaganza. Razzle-Dazzle (2000) depicts an exuberant palette of red, pink, and yellow pouring out of contrasting black and green tones, leading the viewer toward an experience of sensory correspondence among sight, touch, and sound. The painting stares at the viewer. Its straightforwardness allows one to touch the forms of the canvas through the gaze. Colors and shapes are painted with such fluidity and vitality, as if the artist’s brush strokes were conducting a symphony of life, depicted by motions, rhythms and desires. The painting was intended as a celebration of sexuality, representing the moment just after orgasm. This plethoric vision is generated continuously and lavishly, overflowing the picture plane, allowing the viewer to contemplate form through the emotional charge of the action, filled with a sense of static and motion, of excitement and calmness. It is also the memory of the past, the memory of a jingle lurking in the artist’s mind as he made this painting—a jingle taught him as a child by his grandfather, a man he barely knew. This rhythmic frenzy of reds, yellows, greens, and blacks is also as sullen as a memento mori, or the ephemera of time where the illusory becomes real and the real becomes illusory. Bramblett’s paintings create an order or a system, yet they are also disengaged, each in its own moment of spontaneity and irreverence. As in Erasing Extinction (1997–98), the doodling of lines on the entire 90" by 72" canvas, whether reconstructing or deconstructing words, expresses a simplicity and directness counteracted by the “seriousness” in the act of erasing language. There is an impending catastrophic character to this innocent, almost childlike image. Although the title seems to direct us toward the conflicts in documenting the real, it is merely parallel to many other searches in which this question exists. Moreover, it is an irony of the appearance of things abstracted to fit a different scale, as if one were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. This notion is ironic in its connection to time, distorting what once could have been appraised as real. In a much smaller scale (15" by 19"), First & Main (2000) is one of several studies recently created. As a collection of anagrams, these small works reframe the context where things occurred during the artist’s travels. First & Main centers on the relationship between a large, circular brown form and a photograph placed over its left side, depicting the artist in front of a two-story building, a store that belonged to his grandfather. On this brown form, which resembles a rock, a painted grid separates dots of various colors; around it, numbers and arrows point toward the grid. As a classification of properties from the table of elements, which includes names of colors and paints, this work refers to a memory board and its connection to an exhibition of African art shown in the African Museum, in SoHo, a few years ago. These memory boards, which include drawings, words, numbers, and assorted other symbols, serve as codes for a spiritual language used in African rituals. In Bramblett’s study, the codes stand as a bridge between his abstract language of forms and a universal language, one that interlaces all cultures and organically forms a web, one that connects with rhythms and emotions underneath the surface. The spontaneous and fluid aspects of the painting contrast the architectural lines in the photograph. The unifying of two mediums (one flatly painted, the other depicting geometric, three-dimensional lines), whose composition does not seem to harmonize, is not accidental. There is an emphasis on a superposition of the different and almost conflicting planes. Here, the tendency is to emphasize differences rather than the holistic character of the large canvases. It is important to observe that, in the studies, the photographs are added to the painting after the painting has been started. The narratives incorporated in the table of elements and in the photograph are transformed in dispersed fragments of information and memories in the anagram. Even fluidly painted forms seem to have been seduced by thought, transformed to represent structure. As a constructive poem, the study presents the ambiguities contained in the image and its tendency to inform and to produce narrative, though all seem to be abstracted from and subjected to the transitory conditions of time. Seeing Bramblett’s paintings, one grasps a sense of closure, not only as the result of the artist’s determination and passion but because of the work’s existential connection to changes in our cultural surroundings—an attribute of important art. His work is both timely and inevitable as a parallel to understanding the way we perceive visual language today. It serves as a contrast to other new arts that aim to reinvent abstract codes but deny such past histories such as modernism, from which most postmodern art grew, whether as a result of resistance or as a desire to push it further. Bramblett’s art envelops traditions, reassessing old and new values and signifiers in today’s society, as his art hybridizes patriarchal codes of detached verticality into an organic flux of forms and colors, always fluid and open to transcendence, revitalizing and redefining notions of the contemplative expression in art. Galleries Directory | Levy Gallery Artists Registry | Publications & Artists | Email Moore College of Art and Design

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