Brett East's engaging palette

Posted: 23 Jan 2012  |  By: Prue Gibson

Yale University Professor Paul Bloom, an evolutionary psychologist, spoke recently about how and why we experience pleasure in response to various stimuli. You might wonder what this has to do with Australian artist Brett East, who works in a quarter studio in Kippax Street, in Sydney’s Surry Hills. Well, everything.

Most of us have a basic understanding that artworks have the power to prompt intense experiences. But, is this merely a knee-jerk or reflex response to visual beauty or have our brains adapted, over time, to certain accepted information about art? Paul Bloom has conducted experiments to assert his theory that our brains function in physical ways in response to pleasure. Fine wine tastes better when test participants know it is fine wine. Bloom found this was more than snobbery or elitism; he calls it essentialism.

Essentialism is a response to extra information: the story or belief systems surrounding the fine wine which affect our human desire for the wine to taste better. In fact, brain scans show that relevant areas of the brain are more highly activated when participants believe they are drinking better wine. They don’t just think the wine is better, they are experiencing it with higher degrees of pleasure.

This reaction to pleasure extends to visual art. Brett East has the enviable skill of being able to produce suggestive visual stimuli. His paintings are paintings of a painter’s paint. This is a peep show into the mysterious and secret world of a painter’s process. Because we feel we are seeing extra information (the material), we believe the work is even more seductive and we experience higher pleasure.

East’s early works, photographs of pills and beakers of coloured liquids, were the result of chemical experiments. These large-scale photographs were painterly. East has always experimented with colour, understanding its powerful emotional effects. “I can create great spatiality through photography,” he says. “I am influenced by how we look through a photographic lens, how we respond to that as more real, more believable.” This idea dovetails Bloom’s suggestion that our belief systems and extra information affect our perception or taste.

East’s more recent works, of paint tubes oozing paint and of blobs of mixed, blurred and hyper real paint, arouse the brain synapses that announce pleasure. East says: “The work is a play on the idea of the seduction of materials. Essentially, the work is about physical materiality, denied by the technique. But simultaneously the image of the material itself comes through.” To confound (or fascinate) us even more, East uses the exact colours of the colours he represents in paint. He says, “The representation of paint manifests itself, in its former state. I have to ask, What would I paint if there were no subject matter? How far can I go with representation? Abstraction has its own language in this but these works also respond to the question of denied representation using representation.”

This is a deceptively simple idea: a pun or a joke on the history of non-representational painting, of obsessions with material and surface and removing the hand of the artist. However, East’s process is painstaking and tricky. He spends months building up sculptural forms in real paint, then lighting the scene from many angles with hand lights, photographing it and manipulating it. He does it all over again, to find the perfect form of paint with the spatial depth and blurriness that photography can create. “I try to find the unexpected, I try to mould and sculpt form through light.”

East is patient and committed as he works away on solving his problems of space and form, colour and light. His recent photographs look like paintings and his paintings look like photographs. “My work is very spatial, it’s meant to confuse the viewer.” We may be questioning what exactly we see but we are still enthralled by the rich, silky and seductive qualities. He is skilful at achieving colours that appeal to our experiences and our memory. Our ‘pleasure’ brain cells are activated and the more information about the work we have at our fingertips, the higher the experience of believability and therefore of pleasure.

Time is a crucial participant in East’s wrestling match with genre, paint, colour and perception. Time, in its practical sense and its existential sense, is an important configuration in the theory of East’s work. He says, “Time is my enemy.”

Although East suggests to us that he is helping us understand the essential and pure form of art, he is really manipulating our perceptions and playing havoc with our poor old brain cells which dart from pleasure to confusion and back again. The work by East is not cheap table wine, it is a full-bodied red. I know, because my neurological synapses told me so.

Brett East is represented by Gallery 9, Sydney.

Images from top:

Brett East, Painting Sequence 3, 2011, edition of 3, c-type print on Kodak Endura, 122 x 91cm.

Brett East, installation photo of exhibition at Gallery 9, 2011.

Brett East, You are my material accumulation of multiple disjointed experiences within the visible light spectrum of 445 and 510 nanometers, 2010, oil on linen, 213 x 152cm.

Brett East, Seeking to gain access to an immaterial reality beyond the limits of human vision, 2011, oil on linen, 213 x 152cm.

Brett East, Painting Sequence 1, 2011, edition of 3, c-type print on Kodak Endura, 122 x 91cm.

Brett East, Painting Sequence 4, 2011, edition of 3, c-type print on Kodak Endura, 122 x 91cm.

Click here for further information on Gallery 9 .