Thomas Brezing is part of a tradition that I love. Tradition of course is seen in a poor light these days, as is romanticism, emotional and intellectual rigour and the integrity of painting.
The Artist journeys through a skills base, a faith and belief in knowledge and history that is essential to belief and disbelief and the tyranny inherent in these same truths when they are held as possessions and as dogmatic certainties.
This journey in search for a voice is an impossible attempt to unify the world of skill, thinking, truth and philosophy as some form of transcendent/subversive/emotional and intellectual perfect whole, and its attempt at the impossible ensures painting a longer history than the muddied notion of now, cleverness and style. Its truth and transcendent moment is in its eternal failure to be perfect.
I am saying this in defence of painting and it’s often proclaimed death. There is an all too, too easy a belief and reliance on that borrowed, opaque and turgid postmodernist academic rhetoric that is regurgitated time and time again that posits itself as the only valid voice speaking for contemporary art. This proclaims the end of painting as a contemporary art form denying that impulse to mark making and magical dreaming in us all. The steamed bus/train window, the beach and the mirror where we create our own blank canvas with our breathing, primitive, instinctual autonomous and truthful beyond reason and theory. It’s an old fashioned mess, I know, but as I said, has a longer history than the ‘now’ of certain contemporary thinking.
Thomas has this thing called ‘vocation’. This is both an affliction and a gift. It promises light, revelation and truth, young forever in hope and glory and dust and it must be and so be it.
I know these things of Thomas because now and then we share the worst coffee in Ireland. We also share our hope for art and its history, especially painting.
It is a privilege |
