Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig
14.09 - 26.10.2024
In Brett Charles Seiler’s latest exhibition, ‘so many pictures, so little memories’, paintings supported on simple wooden brackets rise up in the middle of the gallery space, facing the wall, works in an engrossing, almost solemn congregation of portraits. A silence pervades the paintings, an aching listlessness: Peter sits across two chairs, Adrian smokes a cigarette, Zander, his face turned away, observes a portrait taped roughly to the wall. Mostly male, their eyes, flat and round, look back inexpressively. They appear neither disturbed nor relaxed, but lost in their own world. And yet, in their focused detachment, they display a state of heightened presence. As if, charged with intimacy, time is suspended, as they exist fully in the closeness of each moment.
For Seiler, the people themselves are not important; rather, “it’s the experience of having them around, lying on the floor, having a beer.” They are not so much characters as they are figures, lingering, hanging out. Friends, lovers, acquaintances of the artist, nestling into the creative clutter of the studio. In Quit Your Day Job, Win the Lottery Instead, the naked figure draped across the sofa carries an air of challenging calm. His awkward eroticism – more conscious of his nudity than he’d like us to think – suggests he could spring up off the sofa at any moment. This sense of performative stillness is echoed in Regarding Bell Hooks, Kholofelo’s Open Wound (2024), where the figure holds the book awkwardly high, too high to read comfortably. Surrounded by fragments of nude body parts hanging on the walls, the book – bell hooks’ essay collection “All About Love: New Visions” – is prominently displayed, adding deeper reflections into the otherwise playful, sensual interactions unfolding around it.
Installation view, ‘so many pictures, so little memories’. Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig
Some of the works are hinged together, and on the reverse of many canvases, the artist has left collage-like mementos. Often, he attaches his original source photos with yellow masking tape. This is his way of “finishing” a piece, stashing these mementoes “where people might one day come across them.” Not necessarily for others to discover, but to mark his own sense of completion, reflecting their tokenized significance. At times, these collages can be highly personal, filled with longing. On the back of Please Tell Mom I Found Him, Seiler has painted his father, who passed away when the artist was just 14 years old. His father’s name, Wayne Seiler, is clearly written across the front of his shirt. In the painting, his father looks like he has just thrown something and is now caught in the moment, tracing its arc. Standing there in a classical, almost heroic pose, reminiscent of an Olympian, the image crystallizes a tension between nostalgia and loss. Its sepia undertones underscoring the meaning locked up in that image, and the sense of irrevocable loss.
Installation view, ‘so many pictures, so little memories’. Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig
In another front-and-back split, Seiler depicts a love triangle – “a typical Capetonian incestuous set up.” On one side, we see Seiler’s boyfriend, Willem, showering, while on the reverse, Willem’s then-boyfriend, Jan, is also captured in the act. In both images, the outlines trail off, inchoate and unfinished, as memories recede, couples break apart, and new relational configurations emerge (you wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Jan reappear in a later exhibition). Many of the works explore this whimsical humour, with the exhibition taking seriously the sense that it should not be taken too seriously. Wooden “Cock” bottles, apples and cigarettes are scattered around the space, and in Inspection Let Down, a moustachioed man blankly peers down to inspect another man’s genitals. It’s campy and puerile, yet with a surprisingly rugged humour, as though challenging us to perceive its casual sexuality as anything other than resolutely unprovocative.
The artist’s use of bitumen, with its dark browns and sombre, lighter browns, boils everything down to a homogenous naïvety. Seiler originally began using bitumen because it was cheap. Over time, his experience with it changed, and he found something appealing in “queering this industrial material, turning this thick substance into something more tender.” The pigment deepens the paintings’ air of inscrutability – the enigmatic gestures, the rich sensory elements gently shrouded and made elusive. The skinny figures leaning against the back of a still-unfinished canvas (Seiler has yet to apply its final collage) in The Week Klemenc Visited (2024), look back at us with typical deadpan insouciance. Topless and inscrutable, their bodies languid, their emotions hidden. Their presence fixing us with strange intensity, and as always, holding full command of our attention.
