Gestural brushstrokes of fleshy pinks, autumnal ochres, and deep blues with flashing accents of crimson reds and rich greens, flicker across the surface of Cecily Brown’s L.C.V., cloaking this pastoral scene in a painterly frenzy. Imagery ebbs and flows in and out of focus, undulating between a traditional autumnal pastoral scene and a cacophony of expressionistic brushstrokes frantically lapping the surface of the work. Brown’s playful engagement with the push and pull of abstraction and figuration is best described in the artist’s own words: “things just naturally break down and become more abstract. When things get too abstract, I definitely feel like I want to bring the figure back. There is a line that I’m always striving for that’s not half-way between figuration and abstraction, it’s both… it’s almost like pulling a moment of claritys in the middle of all the chaos” (Cecily Brown, ‘New York Minute: Cecily Brown’, in: Another, September 2012, online).

Amongst the churning sea of the artist’s expressionistic brushstrokes, a discernible pastoral scene unfolds; two winding trees stretch their barren limbs across the composition, flashes of green pigment denote foliage, ribbons of whites, purple and cool grey form troubled skies above. Here, Brown engages with the rich art historical tradition of the landscape genre, borrowing the rolling fields, craning trees, sumptuous shrubbery and frequently turbulent skies from her artistic forefathers. Scanning the surface of the present work, we can certainly tease apart the warm light of Claude Lorrain’s baroque landscapes, the momentous energy of J.M.W Turner’s expressionistic skies, the elaborate flourishes of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Rococo scenes, and an evocation of plush and fleshy forms so favoured by François Boucher. As author Johanna Drucker writes, “the higher order of compositional organisation in Brown’s work references the grand tradition of theatrical landscapes filled with figures allegorical, historical, or observed. […] She engages with her sources as if in a lover’s provocation to another touch, another exchange, excit.mes nt rising with response at the level of the mark, swatch, line of the brush drawn through the wet paint” (Johanna Drucker, ‘Erotic Method’, in: Cecily Brown: Paintings 2003-2006, New York 2005, p. 9). Indeed, while Brown appropriates the allegorical features of the landscape genre, she simultaneously subverts the tradition to marvelous effect with her sensual, gestural and highly abstracted manipulation of oil paint.

Eschewing the sweeping panoramic format routinely adopted in the landscapes of her artistic forefathers, Brown’s perfectly square composition hypnotizes the viewer with it’s dynamic ribbons and swaths of pigment that ricochet across the surface, reverberating between the four edges of the canvas. This dizzying flurry of pigment slows the viewer, drawing them in and calling them to pause and delve into the work’s tussling brushstrokes. Undoubtedly, in L.C.V, the artist’s loose and brazen brushstroke takes centre stage veiling the allegorical scene at hand. Retreating from the landscape tradition that she has so immersed herself within, Brown turns instead towards a vivid dialogue with the heavyweights of twentieth century painterly abstraction. Playfully teetering on the verge of absolute abstraction, Brown’s highly tactile handling of paint evokes the gestural mark-making and expressive spontaneity of the abstract expressionists, while the bands of colour that define the composition call to mind the rigid compositions of Mark Rothko’s sublime canvases.

Within the raucous celebration of colour and form in the present work, a flurry of fleshy tones concentrated in the centre of the composition appear, hinting at something carnal, at once calling to mind both Francis Bacon’s writhing bodies, and the biomorphic forms of Willem de Kooning’s women. This tangle of limbs, formed from a swirling, vortex of countless tactile brushstrokes introduces a suggestion of the erotic, a sensuality to the painted surface. L.C.V. stands as a visceral and commanding celebration of painting’s elusive power of suggestion. This is Brown at her very best, powerfully mobilising the visceral quality of oil paint to evoke human flesh, perfectly illustrating the artist’s reflection that she wants “there to be a human presence without having to depict it in full” (Cecily Brown in conversation with Lari Pittman, in: Dore Ashton, Cecily Brown, New York 2008, p. 28).

This oscillation between a painterly, abstract surface and a narrative scene of figures set in landscape, absorbs the viewer’s attention, positively hypnotizing us as we search the painted surface for discernable image, for a claritys that Brown will not relent. Through her seamlessly woven array of art historical references, ranging from the seventeenth and eighteenth century masters of the landscape tradition, to the radical abstract painters of the twentieth century, Brown’s highly informed painting practice has garnered international attention. It is her mastery of oil paint, and subsequently her subtle and sensuous depictions of the corporeal that have positioned Brown as one of the most important figurative painters active today.