To Billis Gallery and Tony Brown

Tony Brown, #0730, mixed media, 2007, 17" x 45"

The work originates with broken and abandoned materials Brown recovers from sites around L.A. where old houses are being demolished. These materials have been part of the same objects for perhaps decades and through their long relationship, have gained an almost palpable comfort and familiarity with each other. He’s particularly attracted to this quality in old wooden chairs.

With a high level of craftsmanship that’s never fussy or fetishistic, Brown uses these materials to create roughly torso sized (and sometimes vaguely torso shaped) works by rearranging elements like an arm rest, leg , seat bottom or rocker rail from a particular chair, then altering them so they form a solid surface and lay more or less flat within a compact plane. He fills any voids, a seat bottom frame for example, with less identifiable parts from the same chair, altering and cutting the pieces to form various geometric patterns that fit neatly within the void and within the overall piece.

Tony Brown #0729, mixed media, 25" x 41"

The results are not improvisations on the theme of ‘chair’ but a group of works that appeal to and hold the eye’s attention without calling on any exterior narrative. With some pieces more than others, it can become tempting to mentally reconstruct the chair as it had once existed as functional parts of a real world, but the game wouldn’t prove worth playing partly because their ‘chairness’ is not disguised or mysterious, and partly because of the greater satisfaction the purely visual experience of the works offers. This emphasis on the visual is the core strength of the constructivist approach and points to why, after nearly 100 years of practice, it continues to attract and reward the creative energy of artists.

Brown also exhibits several collages constructed of pages taken from fashion advertisements in 1940s magazines printed entirely in shades of gray. With surgical precision, he removes all aspects of the images that imply specific personality — for example, the face, the hands — and inserts identically shaped paper printed with a complementary gray shade or a griddy lace-like pattern of some sort.

Tony Brown, "Large Inlay," paper collage, 2007 25" x 17"

Any advertising copy receives the same treatment; the specific is removed for the general. The results are haunting and quietly beautiful – a grayscale dream world from another era. In their concept and their manufacture, they reflect the same constructivist imagination and skill seen in the artist’s works based in rescued old chairs.