BEAUTY IS IN THE DETAILS
OPULENCE AND OSTENTATION: A COVID OPERATION
Wayne Brookes
Despard Gallery
Until June 26
Price range: $3950-$28,500
Wayne Brookes is a natural teller of tall tales, a creator of meandering narratives and a compulsive communicator. His body of work is easy to understand as a long investigative conversation, which features engaging digressions and historical anecdotes. Brookes talks a good painting, and all his paintings talk. There is always a lot going on in Brookes’s work – the artist likes to dive deep into detail, and there is rarely negative space of any kind in a Brookes work. This is all well-established and Brookes has a method of working that he’s interrogated and refined over a decadeslong career.
However, things have changed as Brookes has retired from his day job and is now doing nothing but painting, and this has enabled him to possibly get more complex and convoluted, but also to paint in the day. Much of what Brookes has done until now has been accomplished around a works schedule, which necessitated painting at night.
It’s subtle, but this simple shift seems to have given Brookes something new to toy with, and there’s more of a glow to the work, and more comedy. Because along with everything else he does, Brookes is also very funny, and this sense of comedic wit has always infused the work. This has come most obviously in the titles – Brookes loves a good pun, and is even more enamoured of a saucy double entendre. There’s also something rather cheeky at play in how utterly over-thetop some of the works presented here are.
Some paintings are just crammed with activity, despite being filled with inanimate objects, but Brookes’s active absurd imagination creates dialogues between all the things his work contains; statues seem to bicker and the walls are just aching to gossip. This is of course a play on the academic idea that objects do “inform” one another from a historical perspective – and Brookes is sending this up as well, in grandly subtle jokes that could be applied to much of his recent work. Brookes just loves doing this – each joke he makes is filled with layer on layer of impish meaning, and the more he digs, the more is there to be found.
Alongside this, mention must be made of the framing Brookes has had constructed for his works. Lush, golden, gilt frames enfold almost every image, and while these frames look as if Brookes has been scouring the auction rooms, in reality these are all made. Brookes is underlining that his paintings are objects in and of themselves, which increases his complex, witty layering game – here are beautiful objects that depict beautiful objects, with each object having a story to tell.
This complexity isn’t there to confuse though – it’s there to entertain. Brookes’s work is exuberant and excited, like a complex, joyful dance to fast-paced music. It’s nimble but never strict, and is a long way from being pofaced. Brookes is also serious about his fun and there’s a lot of research and meticulous craft in every work, but he also wants his audience to get the joke and see what he sees.