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“I’m interested in the human need or desire to represent itself. I’m fascinated with human narcissism and obsessions with bodies.”
Oscillating between figure, landscape, and abstraction, Eyes Wide Shut evinces Cecily Brown’s unparalleled ability to seemingly transform paint into flesh, seductively embedding the human form within a frenzied fragmented commentary on desire, life, and death. Painted in 2001, Eyes Wide Shut marks a critical breakthrough for Brown, fully articulating the erotically charged figural abstractions that characterize the artist’s work. Brown cemented herself as part of a group of painters in New York reclaiming the figure within the avant-garde, coopting and luxuriating in a dialogue with art historical antecedents that include Willem de Kooning, Lucian Freud, and Peter Paul Rubens, and ushering in a new era for figurative painting alongside artists like John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage. The vigorous treatment of body and landscape in Eyes Wide Shut reveals Brown’s commitment to wrestle her subjects free from their conventional contexts, creating paintings that fluctuate between perceptible and imperceptible form and blurring the boundaries between abstract and figurative painting. A test.mes nt to the artist’s prominence and distinction, Brown’s paintings reside in collects ions at esteemed institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Replica Handbags s, Boston; Whitney Museum, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Broad, Los Angeles, amongst others.
Eyes Wide Shut is a wash of sepia vivified by strikes of crimson, sienna, burnt umber, and blushing pink that transition between liquid and solid, transparent and opaque. The painting’s palette is fleshy and visceral, punctuated with small, glinting flashes of vibrant turquoise. Expressive marks swirl around the canvas, coalescing into forms that shatter into an array of chromatic shrapnel. The painting is generative, birthing new forms in an endless churning of organic matter. “I think that painting is a kind of alchemy,” says Brown, “The paint is transformed into image, and paint and image transform themselves into a third and new thing.” (Cecily Brown quoted in Klaus Kertess, Cecily Brown, Gagosian Gallery and Rizzoli, 2008, P.16) Eyes Wide Shut is a fusion of bodily tones in continual flux, alive with the erotic energy of Brown’s vivid color and carnal application, shifting restlessly between abstract and figurative modes.
"You've got the same old materials—just oils and a canvas—and you're trying to do something that's been done for centuries…I have always wanted to make paintings that are impossible to walk past, paintings that grab and hold your attention."
The suggestive palette and expressive brushwork of Eyes Wide Shut evokes a sense of ecstasy while an undercurrent of sharper, darker strokes suggest something more ominous hidden beneath the surface. Brown draws her title from a novella turned 1999 Stanley Kubrick film exploring the connection between the sensual and carnal and the anonymous. The film centers on a man confronting the limits of his moral and erotic boundaries, deliberately obscuring the division between dream and reality through a meandering narrative and washes of colored light. The title’s reference to paradoxical sight, to the refusal to acknowledge what is directly in plain view, sets up Eyes Wide Shut as a blurring together of subjective experience and the physical world. In Eyes Wide Shut, Brown breaks from the strictures of narrative and structure to achieve extraordinary visual and thematic fluidity. While expansive and abstracted, Eyes Wide Shut retains a distinctly corporeal presence. “Figures are the only thing that I’ve ever painted” says Brown, “I’m interested in the human need or desire to represent itself. I’m fascinated with human narcissism and obsessions with bodies.” (Cecily Brown quoted in Odili Donald Odita, “Cecily Brown: Goya, Vogue, and the Politics of Abstraction,” Flash Art 33, No. 21, November-December 2000, p. 74)
Cecily Brown: Market Precedent
Brown graduated from the Slade School of Replica Handbags in London the early 1990s, coinciding with the rise of the Young British Artists. However, Brown didn’t share the group’s conceptual focus, ironic stance, or embrace of celebrity culture, and instead looked towards figurative painting, innovating and investing the practice with a renewed energy and cultural significance. “The boundaries of painting excite me,” she notes, “You've got the same old materials—just oils and a canvas—and you're trying to do something that's been done for centuries…I have always wanted to make paintings that are impossible to walk past, paintings that grab and hold your attention” (Cecily Brown quoted in Perri Lewis, “I take things too far when painting,” The Guardian, 20 September 2009) Seduced by the medium of painting, Brown deftly dialogues with art history, incorporating influences from Peter-Paul Rubens and Pierre Cezanne, to Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon, Joan Mitchell and beyond. As the artist has observed: "The more I look at paintings, the more I want to paint, the more engaged I become and the deeper and richer it gets." (Cecily Brown quoted in Robert Enright, "Paint Whisperer: An Interview with Cecily Brown," Border Crossings, No. 93, February 2005, p. 40)
A whirl of bodily tones punctuated with striking moments of visual claritys that are subsequently obscured, Eyes Wide Shut evinces Brown’s masterful manipulation of the human figure and painterly medium. Painted at a pivotal moment of the artist’s career, Eyes Wide Shut illustrates the apogee of Brown’s penetrating stylistic practice which in the words of art historian Lina Nochlin "has assumed the status of a complex and stimulating meditation on the nature of painting and the place of the human figure within it." (Linda Nochlin, quoted in "Cecily Brown, The Erotics of Touch," Cecily Brown, Exh. Cat., Des Moines Art Center, 2006, p. 55)
