Brett Charles Seiler
so many pictures, so little memories
14 September – 26 October 2024
Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig
Exhibition video Brett Charles Seiler // Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig
Music by Alex Ant from pixabay.com
Between Pathos and Seduction
Love potions
solve no mysteries,
provide no comment
on the unspoken.
Our lives tremble
between pathos and seduction.
Our inhibitions
force us to be equal.
We swallow hard
black love potions
from a golden glass.
New language beckons us.
Its dialect present.
Intimate.
Through my eyes
focused as pure, naked light,
fixed on you like magic,
clarity. I see risks.
Regrets? There will be none.
Let some wonder,
some worry, some accuse.
Let you and I know
the tenderness
only we can bear.
Essex Hemphill, Ceremonies, 1992
Brett Charles Seiler
so many pictures, so little memories
In Brett Charles Seiler's paintings, glowing with desire, friends, lovers and strangers meet in studio spaces, on makeshift stages permeated by a twilight of intimacy. Like looking through the window of Seiler's studio in Cape Town, the scenes in his paintings unfold as snapshots in the radiance of their interpersonal encounters. Cast shadows contrast sharply with bright fields of light, while the floors and walls are enlivened by fleeting human silhouettes. In these in-between spaces, the emotional becomes palpable, not through grand gestures but through the subtle, almost ephemeral interactions that occur between the delicate outlines in light beacons separated against the darkness. Seiler's works are intimate explorations of the human and at the same time expressions of queer identity and experience. They emerge at the transition from photography to painting as collages of personal fragments that merge into experiences of tenderness, closeness and absence.
In the spatial installation, the new paintings, hinged pictures, packed suitcases, as well as painted apples, Cock-Cola bottles and cigarettes made of wood come together in a narrative. They seem like fascinating pages from the artist's fictional diary, which records poetic and intimate moments. The spatial arrangement of wooden stands, open suitcases and fragile hinged panels shows people meeting, embracing and lying next to each other to listen to each other's breathing and produced sounds. When the hinge is opened, the people split up again. Seiler's present messages, such as "I have so many pictures, so little memories" or "Please tell Mom I found him", seem like delicate echoes — intangible, emotional moments in the room. On the paint-smeared wooden floors of his larger paintings, half-naked figures move like travelers between paint buckets, canvases, brushes, suitcases and furniture. Photographs of male bodies and heads are attached to the shimmering white walls. The earth-tone coloured areas contrast with the fleeting lines that the dim light draws around the figures, giving them a stage-like effect. In the exhibition, Seiler expands the complexity of his new works with delicate interiors, like moving elements of a brightly lit stage set. Some of his works consist of collages made of photocopies, poetic texts and cutouts on cardboard backs intended only for the eyes of those in the know. These back sides provide insights into his artistic practice. Seiler often begins with portrait photographs of people he meets in his studio. He reproduces these as photocopies, which he then distributes in countless stacks around the studio. This way they mix with other images and serve as a starting point for his collage-like paintings in which the boundaries of the media blur.
A dense, almost impenetrable atmosphere in Seiler's paintings is broken up by bright, gleaming whites. These contrast tensely with the deep, powerful black of bitumen. Seiler transforms the mineral oil based material, which is usually used in construction for its resistance and density, into a painterly substance. The bitumen-coated canvases thus give his works a heavy, almost sculptural texture and raw immediacy. The result is a tangible yet rejecting presence that reinforces the intimate and sensual dimension of his subjects. For the artist, working with bitumen is a physical experience, almost like wearing designer clothes. The combination of the dense, viscous bitumen with the smooth, radiant surface of commercial wall paint creates a unique tension between the different layers of the composition. This juxtaposition of surfaces intensifies the expressive depth of his works, in which desire and intimacy, familiarity and loss are impressively interwoven.
The intimacy and volatileness of Seiler's scenes result from his spontaneous, process oriented working style, which captures the fleeting moments of everyday life and the often unspoken emotions between his characters. His conscious choice of materials emphasizes the fragile balance between presence and absence and reflects his nostalgic, often intense examination of the subject of remembering and forgetting. The works reveal a "nostalgic angst," as the artist describes it — an amalgamation of nostalgia and emotional depth that captures both the transience of memories and the longing for what has been lost. But Seiler's works are much more than snapshots of interpersonal acts. As silent and powerful meditations on the transience of life, they function as lasting memories of the past, an eternal search for the irretrievable and what remains of the fleeting moments when the bright minutes disappear and plunge into the deep shadows of one's own identity.
Text by Alexander Wilmschen, 2024
Translated by Hagen Hamm
Please find the exhibition flyer here
