Brendan Cass, Lake Guarda, Italy, 2004
Brendan Cass's brightly-coloured landscape paintings have something of a joyous, faux-naive quality, but are carried out with a keenness and sense of wonder that would distinguish him from the begrudging irony of, say, the Stuckists. The celebratory 'gee-whizz'-ness of the works seems to spill over into hallucinatory mania and acute anxiety (he has participated in group shows titled 'Tensionism' and 'High Anxiety'), a trait familiar to the landscape genre since Gauguin and van Gogh. Indeed, Cass seemed to make that historical connection explicit in his 2003 solo show, 'Europe', at Kenny Schachter Gallery, New York, which featured vivid depictions of Gothic castles, valleys, red and yellow poppy fields and, of course, windmills. At first glance, Cass's paintings appear to have been quickly executed, an impression thwarted on closer observation as histories of thick, globular underpainting reveal themselves, leaving ghostly traces in the finished works.
With numerous shows at Kenny Schachter, Cass is no stranger to showing in New York, which is just as well as the city constitutes an unrivalled wellspring of inspiration for the artist. In 2005, he even adorned Calvin Klein's Madison Avenue outlet with a cityscape mural entitled I Love New York, as part of the 6th annual 'Where Fashion Meets Art' series of events.
At Freight and Volume, Cass will feature alongside bearded wonder Brian Belott in the project room, an artist who takes the hallucinatory one step further, creating numerous lo-fi (occasionally collaborative) collaged books and works on paper, as well as comics, glass and hilarious found-audio pieces. Belott has shown extensively since graduating from New York's School of Visual Arts in 1995 (he professes to having been 'thrown out' of Cooper Union the year before), including an appearance in London as part of a Counter Gallery/Canada Gallery exchange earlier this year.
Brian Belott, selection of collaged books, mixed media
Brendan Cass and Brian Belott
1 December 2006 - 5 January 2007
Freight and Volume
542 West 24th Street
New York, NY USA 10011
Tel: 212 989 8700
www.freightandvolume.com
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