Brendan Getz | when the after-image is the image

Brendan Getz when the after-image is the image

Cover image: night light, 2022, oil on wood, 20 x 16 inches

Brendan Getz when the after-image is the image January 15 - March 26, 2022 Essay by:

David Sprecher

Catalog Design by: Lisa Solar All images courtesy Brendan Getz. Installation images courtesy Nathan Keay. © 2022, Carrie Secrist Gallery

Table of Contents

Introduction………6 Essay by David Sprecher………8-10 Artworks and Installation Views………11-71 Artists Biography………72

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hrough a thoughtfully considered painting practice, Brendan Getz unpacks the rich complexity, depth and nuance of strikingly simple forms and images with an attitude and atmosphere that opens them far beyond their initial approach. For this exhibition, the artist has chosen the title: when the after-image is the image, a nod to the responsive e ect produced in the mind’s eye after seeing a vivid image, but also in reference to how a memory of the past can shape the present. Including over 70 paintings and 7 studio objects, this expansive exhibition is installed speci cally on site, in the gallery’s discrete rooms and spaces that point intimately to one another. Produced over the past decade, this work includes movements into the pandemic, and its e ects of review, reconsideration and change in a multitude of public and private dimensions.

Recalling the artist’s own live-work space, the paintings often depict moments of the domestic and routine in a working studio that doubles as a living room. As the gallery itself is also a former and future domestic space, this doubling of a live-work relationship becomes active throughout the entirety of the exhibition, in exciting and often surprising ways, where the public and the private meet in a discursive encounter.

Among the objects installed are the artist’s own studio chairs, a oor mat and a mahl stick, as paint laden peripheral objects presented for review.

As the philosopher Paul Ricoeur puts it, “…how can we help but leap to the plane of collective memory and evoke the sort of hauntedness, described by historians of the present day, which stigmatizes this ‘past that does not pass’?” For Getz, this involves the doubling of familiar perceptual habit as it meets with collective memory– an uncanny source of renewal that renders the conventional strange, and leads to an expanded and hopeful sense of possibility for the future.

In a recent review of the artists work, Susan J. Musich writes: In the tradition of Luc Tuymans and Giorgio Morandi, Getz depicts fetishized, dreamlike domestic objects such as an ice tray, bookends, a toaster, and a drinking glass. He poetically writes, “A cared for object – caring world. A disposable object – disposable world.”

Using a minimal palette, subtle color contrasts, shadows, and distinct brush strokes, Getz’s attention to detail demonstrates a caring for his subjects that elevates them above “usual object” status. These lyrical and elegant paintings provide a sense of serenity in these turbulent times.

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Brendan Getz, when the after-image is the image, 2020. Oil on wood, 11 x 14 inches

Essay by David Sprecher

After Image Among metaphors that structure thought in western culture, the equating of seeing with knowing is primary: Do you see what I'm saying? It's hard for me to see why you would think that. I feel like I’m in the dark. Take a hard look at how you feel. Is it becoming clearer? See for yourself. But seeing is always shaped by expectations and recollections, what we desire to see and what we've seen before. when the after-image is the image—an eleven by fourteen inch painting that shares its uncapitalized title with the exhibition of seventy works by Brendan Getz at Carrie Secrist Gallery—is not a painting of the sun. Rather, it's a painting of looking at the sun (a painting of a memory of looking at the sun) that's so rigorous in its verisimilitude that it's dif cult to see. One feels the familiar seduction of the rising or setting sun infused with the panic of looking at something too bright for eyes. A sense of danger opens, the impulse to look away. In the alchemy of blended paint there's an emergent luminosity so bright that it sheds visibility. How is this achieved?

Even upon close inspection it's hard to gure out. I perceive the subtle blue surrounded by a thin ring of white that represents the bright spot of the sun, but I don't trust it. It's not blue is it? It's bright white. It's brighter than white. It's light. But no, it is very blue.

And it's paint, not light. It's blue paint cloaked in past perceptions of brightness and associations of brightness with white—and it's this subliminal blue that triggers the impulse to look away. It's the exact blue of retinal shock that's present during encounters with intense luminosity; the color that lingers, shaped like the sun, in the wake of looking at it. This is the after-image alive in the image, both blue paint and recollected brightness, and it's hard to see.

It's also therefore hard to know. The uncomfortable vibrancy of the after-image reads as a kind of veiled presence, a stranger in the painting. And while it’s tempting to reduce this presence to a residue of the impressive close-looking that Getz brings to his subjects, there's a remainder: an alien vitality within the insistently quotidian subjects of Getz' paintings that make them both sublime and disquieting.

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The painting residual eck (ice tray) confronts the viewer with a generic ice tray, upended and empty, standing on an indistinct countertop leaning against an indistinct wall. In each of its sixteen hollows a glint of refracted light hovers slightly off center like the highlights that radiate presence in the eyes of cartoons. From within these glints the tray feels surprised as if we snuck up on it, caught it doing something shameful. It's there, hiding something behind its back, utterly present and aware of us and in the same moment receding into its unknowability: into the soft focus and muted tones of the rendering and the perspectival instability of the tray’s relationship to the surfaces that support it.

What makes this collection of work thrilling to encounter is that the subject of these portraits, the stranger in them, isn't contained by any single work nor by the exhibition as a whole. The porosity of the images, their softness and instability—their furtiveness —allows for slippage between them, despite how diverse they are, and slippage between them and the world. As I try to unpack the excited discomfort I feel looking at a jury of six evenly hung images of the sun, I notice a re ection of ceiling light on the polished oor that has almost the exact hue and scale of the rightmost sun. The tall oor to ceiling windows at my back that open the seventh- oor gallery to the city expose me to the warmth and light of the actual sun cast across the array of ef gies.

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On an adjacent wall, the only non-solar painting in the room—a lush portrait of a small magnetic dish for gathering sewing needles—radiates its magnetism, gathering light and pulling at the marble-sized suns in the room and the sky. Down the hall, side mirror (wait) collects a corresponding group of luminous orbs, the moon and some street lights, in the side mirror of a car. Next to that painting, the scale of three vertical linear re ections on a body of water in gleam plane (east bay), collapses into the linear re ections on the rounded and implicitly smaller surfaces of a french press and an antique watering can in gleam plane (coffee painting) and gleam plane, watering can.

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Encountering residual eck (ice tray) feels like encountering an opossum in the dark, an effect that many of Getz' paintings achieve. As I approach Containers, I surprise a thin glass vessel sitting precariously near the edge of a surface, casting its shadow on the wall behind it. The at light is coming from behind me as if I opened a pantry door onto this private scene and the shadow on the wall―the shadow vessel behind (within) the glass―is visible through the translucent container that's casting it. It's another species of image/after-image superimposition that sparks a recognition of presence in the painting. In this instance, seeing the shadow of the glass within the glass evokes an intense recognition of vulnerability and identi cation with the subject. Its shadow becomes something profoundly private, a self-image that it's attempting and failing to conceal. In that failure there’s a twang, a reverberation between the volume of glass and its exposed and attened shadow that's ampli ed by the spatial tension between the horizontal surface supporting it and the wall. The shadow of the vessel transitions seamlessly between the two planes implying a tight proximity but to the right another shadowy form is wedged in the gap at an angle that implies some distance between them. Getz insists on this instability, this open-endedness that grants resonance. Like the restrained exing of color that seeps into view as you spend time with the work, the ambiguity of that gap is an animating breath that makes the painting read more like a portrait than a still life.

The space of representation is then more zealously punctured by the presentation on low plinths of objects from Getz' studio—mahl sticks, chairs and stools, the mat he stands on when he paints. The objects challenge me to see how egalitarian I can be with my attention while proposing a kind of ontological parity across broadly varied constellations of matter. Pockets of snow on a mountain in summer snow (tetons) ally with stray ecks of white paint on an angular folding chair. Painted smoke stacks in supports reiterate vertically arranged, paint spattered mahl sticks. The paint on these objects, in its incidental accumulation, is free of its duty to represent the world which awakens the possibility of that liberation in the hung pictures. The objecthood of the paintings themselves becomes yet another after-image.

And this uidity between the space I inhabit as a viewer and the space of representation encourages an extension of the attentiveness the paintings engender out beyond the frame of the gallery. In an inclusion that exes the capaciousness of Getz' vision, brim, ear, from my dad, we see a portrait of the artist's father's right ear under the brim of his Stetson hat, the only direct, albeit partial, representation of a human gure in the show. Divorced from the rest of the head, the ear becomes another semi-living, autonomous object at home with the various containers, plates, plants, houses, mountains, planes, birds, smokestacks, bookends, suns and shadows. There's an exciting correlation between the reaching brim of the hat and the formally and chromatically congruous ower petals in the nearby painting evening and outside (surface company and tones between). The petals illuminate the delicacy within the traditionally masculine parabola of the brim and harmonize in their shared capacity for cradling sunlight. But more importantly, framed with the ear, the curve of the brim becomes a key—a visualization of listening, of receptivity—that unlocks the attentiveness that this work performs and teaches. Suddenly all the open and empty containers—a jar, a plate, a void between bookends, a magnetic dish—are listening.

The mahl sticks are listening. The empty chairs. The walls. The sun. I'm listening.

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~David Sprecher

studio room, live-work space, both/and, peripheral and residual attention These objects reference points inside the studio, or views outside of it, both looking out and looking in. Many of them are sort of peripheral or auxiliary objects in and around my live-work space. The light sits outside my studio building in an adjacent, multi-level parking garage, a place I like to take walks at night (when the garage is mostly empty). It’s on a motion sensor, and lights up when I’m nearby. The box-fan is almost always running for ventilation in the studio, with a nice sound and an open window. Pushpins and masking tape are under and outside most of the panels I’m working on, and the oor-mat I’ve used for the past ten years or so, worn from where I stand to work. studio window, supports These images are direct views of adjacent buildings and objects out of my studio window. Most of the ventilation and equipment is supported through a network of thin cables, which become dif cult to see at a distance. The mahl stick is a support I’ve used to lean on for painting over the last ten years or so. interior/exterior

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In this group there is an image of a mirror inside the studio re ecting a room window, and next to it, a painting of the same buildings window, but from the outside.

a mirror in the room and an open window, 2021 Oil on canvas 60 x 36 inches

open window, outside, 2021 Oil on canvas 50 x 38 inches

utility light (motion sensing), 2021 Oil on canvas 36 x 60 inches

Installation view

still can see, 2020 Oil on canvas 16 x 12 inches

box fan (for open windows and ventilation), 2019 Oil on canvas 48 x 36 inches

water tower, 2019 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches

studio wall and room on the other side (end of the day), 2021 Oil on wood 10 x 8 inches

supports (studio window), 2021 Oil on wood 8 x 10 inches

supports, 2019 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches

Previous page: Installation view This page: both/and, 2020 Oil on wood, masking tape, pushpin 24 x 11 x 1 inches

gleam plane, re ector, armor These are all objects I encounter everyday in my home studio.

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The light gleam is present and speaks to the surface, something metallic, or wet. As a small gesture, so much rests on it, or is revealed by it. In a Dutch armor painting, it aspires to a sense of power but upstages or undermines the body behind it. In a coffee maker, it’s a sense of utility, where a metallic surface might persist past its rst use. This form of the long gleam is something I catch in my eye, at the park overlooking my home in the east bay, or in the brass watering can inside the studio. My initial attraction has me looking for it in other places, where I’m nding it again because it was already there, coming in from another time.

Previous page: Installation view gleam plane, watering can, 2021 Oil on wood 10 x 8 inches

Installation view

glint plane and another, 2021 Oil on wood 24 x 20 inches

plate, 2020 Oil on wood 20 x 16 inches

gleam plane (coffee painting), 2021 Oil on wood 10 x 8 inches

ice tray painting, 2020 Oil on wood 20 x 16 inches

containers

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The containers are all from my studio or living space, which, out of proximity and practicality, is one and the same space. A large window allows natural light to come in, and illuminates a narrow kitchen with its objects on the counter. Their materiality responds differently to that window light– some diffuse it, others re ect, or redirect it, but all of them respond to a type of presence as absence.

The glass vase sits in a small pantry with a single bulb, its shadow is seen through it.

container (glass), 2020 Oil on wood 14 x 11 inches

plastic cup painting, 2020 Oil on wood 14 x 11 inches

lee shore (bookends), 2021 Oil on wood 20 X 16 inches

Container, 2020 Oil on stretched canvas 20 x 16 inches

Following page: installation view containers, 2021 Oil on wood 24 x 20 inches

shadows and concrete These are nearby plant images, either leaning against a wall or most often against something concrete. The shadows refer to angles, aspects and objects– points of relation that offer more than what is in the frame of view. I love how William Nicholson painted his still life shadows– they were prominent with equal attentive presence.

evening and outside (surface company and tones between), 2021 Oil on wood 30 x 22 inches

This page: double contact (building), 2021 Oil on wood 30 x 22 inches

double (surface lean / contact between), 2021 Oil on wood 20 x 16 inches

aspects, views, access and translation– points of contact between become their own objects too, 2021 Oil on wood 14 x 11 inches

pigeon painting (from the parking lot), 2019 Oil on canvas 30 x 24 inches

like a cloud and still on the concrete, 2021 Oil on wood 10 x 8 inches

my dad’s birds, my dad’s hat.

These images were produced from stills of video footage my dad had taken of his own birds. He had been housing these pigeons for some time, and grew to see them in a different way than he had rst encountered them. Initially, he brought them in as a training tool to work with his dogs for bird hunting, but their perceived utility and object-hood transitioned over time to what he referred to as a family, and couldn’t bear to bring any harm to them, or any other birds for that matter. He noticed them as possessing their own awareness, and developed a care for them that he would describe as a form of personhood, or an intimacy enveloped by the recognition of another, beyond any terms of utility.

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My dad’s hat is here with these. The reference came from a detail of a picture he sent me of the hat, while he was wearing it. It’s shape reminded me of a ower petal I had painted, a soft transition moving toward his ear.

brim, ear, from my dad, 2021 Oil on wood 24 x 20 inches

my dad's birds, 2019 Oil on canvas 48 x 36 inches

my dad's birds (red, blue), 2019 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches

my dad's birds (red, blue, green), 2019 Oil on canvas 30 x 24 inches

my dad's birds (pigeon painting), 2019 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches

my dad's birds (dark), 2019 Oil on canvas 24 x 20 inches

residual forms, interior/exterior, the domestic, train view The house paintings were developed from video stills taken from the window of a commuter train, traveling at high speed through an Oakland neighborhood in California.

In the middle of the room, the compressed pillows are from the corner of my own couch. The couch pillows take the shape of the last one to sit against them, like a mold holding a presence of someone or something– a residual form.

The chairs are from my studio; the stationary chair sits at my desk, and the rocking chair is positioned toward the painting wall. I spend more time looking at paintings than painting them.

These chairs have an inverse relationship to one another, the seat and surrounding structure etc., but share the fact that they are copies or translations of designs, reproduced for many years after their initial introduction.

Previous page: Installation view train view, house painting (tree), 2019 Oil on canvas 48 x 36 inches

This page: train view, house painting (blush), 2019 Oil on canvas 48 x 36 inches

train view for two way mirrors, long recall, 2019

Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches

train view for two way mirrors, 2019 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches

train view (color, constant, recall), 2019 Oil on wood 10 x 8 inches

windshields, transitions, expanded time Some of these are images of a windshield from the inside, and some from the outside, a mediated view. A car is another container, and so is the surface between it and everything else. Anticipating a place can make the process of moving toward it feel peripheral, with a feeling or desire to pass the time, and the fringe of anticipation or residue of memory alters the speed of transition.

night light, 2022 Oil on wood 20 x 16 inches

windshield painting (glass plane), 2021 Oil on wood 20 x 16 inches

red windshield, 2020 Oil on wood 10 x 8 inches

side mirror (wait), 2021 Oil on canvas 14 x 11 inches

gleam plane (east bay), 2021 Oil on wood 11 x 14 inches

when the after-image is the image (800 heinz), 2020 Oil on cardboard, wood shelf 12 x 13 x 1 inches

plane view, 2020 Oil on cardboard, wood shelf 12 x 13 x 1 inches

mountains, residual snow, Tetons My grandmother made a painting of the Tetons that hung in our living room while I was growing up, which remained there after she passed away. At the time, she was the only painter I had ever known personally, and painting as a practice was something I associated with her. In some transitional moment of moving, the painting was lost. These mountains are also the Tetons, seen in the summer through binoculars. It was the rst time I’d seen them, but they didn’t look like the mountains in her painting– hers were covered in snow. The snow does stay in all the seasons though, as remnants and patterns of previous depths in conjunction with the surface.

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The chairs are from my studio, where I see their form in the mountains, and vice versa– in particular the residual paint on their surface. These chairs are also copies or translations of designs, long after they were introduced.

Previous page: Installation view near and far at the same time, snow stays in all the seasons, 2020 Oil on canvas 36 x 24 inches

summer snow (tetons), 2021 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches

in and around all the words (tetons), 2020 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches

valley wall, between the trees and a binocular view, 2021 Oil on wood 30 x 20 inches

Previous page: Installation view plane, side view, 2019 Oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches

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Two of the paintings are of a dappled light, falling beneath a tree canopy, one from my wedding and another from a walk. The other painting is of a projection screen depicting a window, a still from a lm (Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window). All of them seem for me to hold in transition, to offer a subsequent or previous space, but redirect toward an expanded sense of the present.

The building bolt I painted twice, one based on the other. The bolt was outside my door, and the shadow it cast reminded me of an elliptical orbit. At the time, I was reading about how the planets pull on the sun when they move together, enough to wobble it through space. In a sense, the planets don’t orbit the sun itself, but a place called the barycenter, a virtual space between the sun and the planetary bodies, where they share a mutual center, dependent and pulling on one another.

on a walk and trees overhead, 2021 Oil on wood 16 x 12 inches

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nd one another in a found world, 2021 Oil on wood 16 x 12 inches

screen view (still here), 2020 Oil on wood 16 x 20 inches

windshield painting (glass plane), 2021 Oil on wood 20 x 16 inches

after-image stays (rose), 2020 Oil on wood 14 x 11 inches

painted building bolt and a barycentric view, 2021 Oil on canvas (2) 14 x 11 inches

a blue sun, when the after-image is the image.

Most paintings of the sun that I’ve seen are warm, with a white or yellow center– but a sun that reads right to me is blue. Painting a blue sun gave my eyes the feeling of being there, of looking too long and feeling it in my retina, like an after-image that overlaps with the rst response. After-images occur because the photo-chemical activity in the retina continues after stimulus, as if a photonegative was produced after seeing the positive. When they align on top of one another, something curious happens, something I recognize. It’s like experiencing a past-presence, or a residual memory that is shaping the moment in the present.

The magnetic container is a studio object that holds sewing needles, but to know it’s magnetic somehow changes the way I see it.

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The mahl stick in this room brackets the exhibition with the other.

Previous page: Installation view This page: when the after-image is the image (I'll be seeing you), 2020 Oil on canvas 14 x 11 inches

when the after-image is the image (building sun), 2021 Oil on canvas 14 x 11 inches

when the after-image is the image (structuring forgetfulness), 2021 Oil on canvas 14 x 11 inches

between what is, ought and could be (image-object), 2021 Oil on canvas 14 x 11 inches

when the after-image is the image (implied sun / also the sun), 2021 Oil on canvas 14 x 11 inches

blue sun, peripheral vision, 2021 Oil on canvas 14 x 11 inches

Previous page: Installation view gleam plane and peripheral vision, 2021 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches

being (in time) is also being alongside, 2021 Oil on wood 10 x 8 inches

container (magnetic, for sewing), 2021 Oil on wood 20 x 16 inches

Brendan Getz is an artist who works with painting, writing, installation and sound to slow down and attend to a subtle multiplicity of meaning between objects, images and form – honing in on a politics of attention and the nuance of close looking, while proposing care as a radical act. Brendan has exhibited in galleries and institutions throughout the US including the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, the Contemporary Art Center in Las Vegas, and the LeRoy Neiman Center in Chicago. His current solo exhibition, when the after-image is the image, is on view at Carrie Secrist Gallery through February 26th. Brendan holds a BFA from Belmont University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He works out of Berkeley and Los Angeles and is the co-founder and current co-director of the project space take care in downtown Los Angeles.