Studio Visit with Chris Brooks: Glare in painting Rocks!

that's my head, surrounded by geometry in a painting. i have stepped into the 'Tartis'

They don’t have a title, so I just call this series the ‘Karaoke Paintings.’ They are tawdry and shiny and have the sort of appeal that I associate with the nighttime decor of a Karaoke bar. Chris Brooks, who made them, told me a very sad story; it seems that, when he showed them two years ago, people didn’t seem to love them All that Much. Let me tell you why I disagree.

I’m a fan of puzzles, complicated conversations, conundrums. With a good argument on the table (Plato or Aristotle? Beatles or Stones?) and a willing partner to argue with, you’ve got hours, if not a lifetime, of fun ahead of you.

Chris Brooks makes paintings that are not easy to like, which is, in part, why I love them. They relax me. They let my mind feel its own ’smartness’ even as they have the last word. “Ahh,” I think, rather naively. “Let me just look at this piece of visual noise; let me ‘worry’ it a bit.”  Pretty soon, I can push and pull the various compositional elements. Some are just marks; some are illusion. Or are they? Labels don’t pertain here. A squirt of white spray paint — a bona-fine ‘mark,’ made with Brooks’ hand — is almost indistinguishable from the glare of a fluorescent light that’s in the room (you know, ‘real’ life). In another painting from the same series, there are two squirts of white paint that, to my mind’s eye, are ’supposed to be’ fluorescent lights. Now who’s smart? Not I. My mind just felt the need to label a white squiggle, which, ultimately, is nothing more than a white squiggle. Pretty silly.

Pretty squiggle.

The shinier the surface the better. Just look at these all-too-ambient shots that he took with his iPhone in his studio. We’re mirrored, we’re IN the paintings. And that’s cool. I tried to tell Brooks about things like Phenomenology and Gestalt and perceptual apparati that are inside our eyes and brains that just can’t be helped, but he talked about Narnia. He said:

Maybe it comes out of the Magician’s Nephew: somewhere in a normal house you can go into, a door, a closet you can open, and suddenly, through the back of that closet there are different laws that pertain.

One of the things I liked about Dr. Who: he traveled in the Tartis, a phone box;  you went inside and it’s this huge room. There was something very compelling about it, for it to be possible that there are two things at once.

A new alt title for these works: ‘Enter at Your Own Risk.’