Contextually, Brian's paintings speak volumes. A dream-like, rainy day nostalgic and melancholic chord permeates drip laden and dark imagery. We are caught up in a waltz without meter, at first losing step while seeking then finding a distant and muffled rhythm. Bold yet raw imagery of form and figure are opposed by creation; each striking at conflict while gravitating towards harmony. Within this duality emerges a subtle tension that keeps us suspended; a long breath holding, the exhale acknowledging the moment. There is implicit poetry about this work with untamed verse caught in candy colored fields of pigment; the duality of creation and creature, deconstructed, buried and unearthed demanding a response.
Brian Smith is an artist of a different ilk. He's honest, not a lot of fanfare. But his work comes at you with a twist, like a DNA helix; color, form, shape and line creating two reciprocal visually encoded strands of perspective. He paints from the inside out presenting opposing natures of similar themes. In its resolution, there is mathematics with universal constants. A resulting familiarity comforts us; we want to continue our exploration. At the extremities, bright opaque color fields reflecting tight interwoven dramas of form and creation are opposed by dark, burdened and dense renderings. Tension, symmetry and balance propel Brian's confident imagery.
Three distinct sets of paintings visually display his staunch dogma on "order." With building blocks of ideas, he moves the viewer through an equation. A set of paper works made with graphite and acrylics employ a gentle hand; a blending of mutely painted organic shapes and loose structure. The next set of paintings, call them appetizers, are 3 near fluorescent paintings that quickly establish Brian as a frontiersman. He's on a mission; "daring" and fearless; albeit with gentle and delicate hand that he announces the coming violence. The luminescence of "Pain is to come" is nearly off-putting; embedded silhouette figures offset by intense light. Almost, with a naiveté, he courts us with color. "She Cayman to my life" pits nude female form against a Cayman alligator, almost as a formula, begging the question of our connection and relationship to the nature of the beast. Are we dominant or the dominated, hunter or the hunted?
Like a crescendo Brian creates momentum through the body of the work. His entrées are not for the vegetarian. He is a carnivore. "Stampede," "Revo Baby," and "Never touch Baby Birds" are three aggressively painted paintings. Unlike the delicate form of the Fluorescent paintings, truncated torsos haunt this trio. Strewn with limbs, the summation of the whole, caught in the spiraling helix, we are now inside the dark-side; with a dramatic change of paint and palette. Despite the white wash of these paintings, we are in the dark. Well developed and structured, there is lots of underpainting with tons of texture; massive paint drips endemic of his fearlessness.