Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Colorful and Liquescent New Paintings by Brian Donnelly

For Toronto based artist Brian Donnelly, featured here, painting is a risky business. At first beautifully rendered in oil, he then sprays his subjects with turpentine and hand sanitizer until their faces are distorted beyond recognition, to a more limited expression. Donnelly's work is all about embracing limitations: "I ask a lot of questions about art and how we define it," he says. "How far away from the original state can we go before we stop calling something art? In the process, I end up drawing a parallel between the fragile nature of artwork and the human condition."

For Toronto based artist Brian Donnelly, featured here, painting is a risky business. At first beautifully rendered in oil, he then sprays his subjects with turpentine and hand sanitizer until their faces are distorted beyond recognition, to a more limited expression. Donnelly’s work is all about embracing limitations: “I ask a lot of questions about art and how we define it,” he says. “How far away from the original state can we go before we stop calling something art? In the process, I end up drawing a parallel between the fragile nature of artwork and the human condition.”

In deteriorating his work, Donelly contemplates what it means to have something taken away, and yet still be emotional and provocative. His latest series, “Nothing Lasts Forever”, debuting at Stephanie Chefas Projects in Portland on May 6th, explores this meaning of “loss”. His new paintings feature unrecognizable faces, where the medium drips off of the canvas like rainbow-colored waterfalls, making the subjects appear almost tearful or mournful as they experience the loss of their identities.

“I approach portraiture as a mark of our decidedly ephemeral nature as living beings,” Donelly says. “In the tradition of portraiture the sitter makes contact with the eternal, their likeness carried across generations. My portraits contradict that tradition. Like memories, these paintings are unreliable: portraits of their own loss rather than permanent effigies. I think of this work less as portraiture, and more as a paradoxical document of absence in which lasting forever is defined by being reduced to nothing.”

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
Tel-Aviv-based artist Ori Toor creates prints and animations that rely on happy accidents. His so-called “gibberish” prints are unplanned and unsketched. These vibrant, trippy works merely stumble upon familiar icons and forms, creating final products that both exhibit a single vibe and can be seen as disparate, otherworldly sections.
Mérida, Venezuela based artist Miguel Devia injects an emotional intensity into his portraits of close friends and figures of literature. Though his subjects are ones that he is familiar with, he often strays from capturing their likeness or any particular sense of familiarity. Rather, his primary interest seems to be in their expressiveness, playing with line and contrasting colors to evoke the emotion of the person or setting. Devia works in both digital illustration and oil painting, and in both mediums, he combines a psychological acumen with graphic design and illustrative devices.
Koralie's interest in "folk customs, emblematic monuments and animistic ritual" translates into stencil work on canvas that evokes cultures from across the world and creates illusionary layers. In a show currently running at Jonathan Levine Projects, titled “Indigo Blood Project,” the artist’s newest works are shown. Koralie was featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 46 and most recently on the Hi-Fructose blog here.
It's not hard to become absorbed in Cristi Rinklin’s otherworldly paintings. The artist creates seamless layers of billowing, amorphous forms and sharply defined lines to depict post-human landscapes that appear to hover weightless in space. These worlds, which take the form of both paintings and installations, are influenced by digital technologies while channeling a grand tradition of illusion in painting. "It is my desire to create paintings and installations that seduce the viewer into believing that the impossible spaces that are presented within them can potentially exist," the artist says.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List