Trees

Brian Campbell
October 12-November 16, 2019
Opening reception Saturday, October 12, 6:00-8:00 pm
Artist will be in attendance

Kirk Hopper Fine Art is pleased to present Trees, a solo Viewing Room exhibition from Texas-based artist Brian Scott Campbell. Featuring six new paintings that were made recently during an artist residency in Provincetown, Mass., and in the artist's studio in Denton, Texas.

Brian Campbell, Jimmy's Hideaway, 2019, flashe on canvas, 20" x 16"

These small-scale flashe on canvas works depict abstracted landscapes populated by trees, mountains, rolling farmland, and bodies of water. The works are primarily in grayscale and punctuated by dashes of flat color. The thinly textured paint and loose chalky black outlines create a sense of play and movement to an otherwise motionless scene. The paintings revive familiar motifs of landscape, but the results are unhinged and distinguished by personal iconography and bold child-like abstraction. Campbell utilizes the conventions of pictorial space to push form, line, and surface to create collision-like exchanges of symbols and shapes. Campbell allows humor to surface while also deftly holding it in check, taking a jab at the sublime, and permitting something sober, emblematic, and deeply human to emerge. Seen together, Campbell's paintings unfold like portals or stage sets taken from an elevated view of a secret world. These images suggest an evolving yet fragmentary narrative, a story with no distinct time of day or night, a fictional domain manifested by the act and materiality of painting.