“I think I was doing a lot of sexual paintings… what I wanted – in a way that I think now is too literal – was for the paint to embody the same sensations that bodies would. Oil paint very easily suggests bodily fluids and flesh… I've always wanted to have a lot of different ways of saying something… so that you might have a veil of paint that suggests some very delicate skin, but then I'll want something very meaty and clogged next to it”
With its lyrical brushstrokes sweeping across the canvas, rhythmically oscillating between gestural abstraction and tantalising figuration Hard, Fast and Beautiful bears all the hallmarks of Cecily Brown’s playful and suggestive painting practice. Rendered here in elegant grisaille tones, Brown’s feverish brushstrokes tease the viewer with a flurry of gestural marks that offer glimpses of figurative elements, only to subsume them in a frenzy of abstraction. Laid bare in striking monochromatic palette, Brown’s grasping, sweeping strokes form a grid like composition that conceals the scene at hand. Brown playfully challenges traditionally perceived boundaries of abstraction and figuration, hinting at figuration in unexpected places while ultimately embracing the unpredictability of gesture.
In a masterful manipulation of the viewer’s perception, the act of looking converges with the voyeuristic pleasure elicited by her sexually charged imagery. Brown’s use of paint is highly tactile, spilling and slipping across the canvas in a dreamlike blur, the frenzied strokes and scrapes of Hard, Fast and Beautiful exude a carnal quality, poetically insinuating a physical experience. Brown follows as the natural heir in a historical celebration of the tactile, material quality of paint, calling to mind a rich lineage of artistic forefathers from Peter Paul Ruben’s soft and sensuous nudes to Paul Cézanne’s lounging bathers and Francis Bacon’s writhing twisted figures. Indeed, the present work seems to borrow Willem de Kooning’s Women whose fleshy forms emerge from a cacophony of tumbling, crashing brushstrokes that sprawl outwards towards the viewer.
Significantly, Brown subverts this historically male tradition of corporeal painting, describings her practice in her own words: "It is about being a painter, here, now, at this moment when it is ok to paint again, incredibly conscious of the past and then throwing it off…And it is about paint—wet, liquid, spreadable, mutable. It is about paint doing what bodies do during sex, pressing up, greasy, rubbings , penetrating, slipping, saturated. It is hard to know where the figures stop and start, there are extra body parts, free floating appendages, an orgy, magically real…It is about being a girl and painting like a boy. The male gaze repossessed, kidnapped: enough of how you look at us, this is how we see you…a woman painting a man as brazenly, as unforgivingly as men have always painted women… It is cooled down under varnish, fixed behind a veneer that is almost glass, laminated to keep it at a certain distance to protect it or perhaps more to protect you" (A.M. Holmes, ‘Motion Pictures’, Cecily Brown, 2000, pp. 70-71).
Beyond the confines of Art History, Brown remains deeply engaged with wider cultural references. Drawing from literature, film, music, magazines and photographic sources, Brown paints a resolutely contemporary corporeal experience. Indeed, she has even completed a series of paintings based on the famous photograph of nude women that graces the front cover of Jimi Hendrix’s classic album Electric Ladyland. It is this combination of reverence for art historical and subversion of artistic tradition that has led to Brown’s position as one of the most important painters of her generation