Brinsfield is now in the vanguard of postmodern artists making abstract paintings that subtly fold in personal as well as political content. Combining content with abstraction is an aesthetic high-wire act; Brinsfield accomplishes it in a variety of ways. His paintings, made with shiny enamel paint on paper attached to canvas, have sleek liquid surfaces that are beautiful and enormously seductive. Stylistically, the work oozes confidence and appears effortless, and the beauty of the paintings pulls the viewer up close. Careful examination, however, gradually reveals shapes and forms that resemble such things as tanks, caves, cars, highways, and planes. It is up to the viewer to decode such symbolic shapes; some may refer to the horror of contemporary war scenes, while others reflect the artist’s love of automobiles or music.

While Brinsfield’s work evokes the gestural and intuitive painting style of the Abstract Expressionists as well as the conceptual agenda of postmodernism, he is also a classicist. Before brush meets canvas, each of his paintings is thoroughly and painstakingly worked out on paper—these “sketches” are works of art in themselves— and the imagery he incorporates into his work is the product of considerable deliberation. Brinsfield’s ability to combine contemporary sociopolitical signifiers with the most pressing formal issues of Western painting defines a career that fully embraces the dilemmas, challenges, and delights of our visual culture.

excerpt from an essay by Elisabeth Kirsch for the Charlotte Foundation Awards

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