The Poetics of Henri Paul Broyard’s Interiors
by JENNA CROWDER
MARCH 28, 2018
RESPONSE > PORTLAND, MAINE
by JENNA CROWDER
MARCH 10, 2018
RESPONSE > PORTLAND, MAINE
"WHCZ", Acrylic on Canvas, 24" x 18", 2015 (left) "HTLF", Acrylic and chalk on canvas, 24"x18", 2015 (right)
Image courtesy of Grant Wahlquist Gallery
“And how should one receive an exaggerated image, if not by exaggerating it a little more, by personalizing the exaggeration? The phenomenological gain appears right away: in prolonging exaggeration, we may have the good fortune to avoid the habits of reduction. With space images, we are in a region where reduction is easy, commonplace. ...But if reduction is easy, exaggeration is all the more interesting.”
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
"SCRASC", Acrylic, Flashe, and Spray Paint on Canvas, 60" x 48", 2017
Image courtesy of Grant Wahlquist Gallery
Wandering through the abstracted living rooms and bedrooms of Henri Paul Broyard’s paintings feels a little like seeing a lover’s house for the first time. As viewers, we mentally push a fresh cigarette packet aside to better look at the curious yellow shape on the table. We notice the painting above a patterned couch and linger in its forms, anticipating insight into whoever hung the work. Moving into a bedroom, we peer past the royal blue and white striped duvet toward shelves adorned with brightly-colored trinkets, each of them holding a memory we’ll likely never fully know. Books beckon us because the covers are painted so exactingly, and more so because the titles have been omitted. These details tellingly remain quiet: ceramic or marble busts are faceless. Packages bear no logos. And while we feel we know these homes are lived in, we find no people. The paintings in Broyard’s TWELVE at Grant Wahlquist Gallery in Portland, Maine, invite us close and then, on the verge of recognition or embrace, intimacy is withheld. The absence of clear answers in these paintings is exactly what keeps us looking.
Broyard paints his interiors in a stiff, matter-of-fact way that keeps us at a distance and suggests these rooms and the objects in them are invented, taken, or memorized. In fact, he begins his work spending time in second-hand stores, thrift shops, and garage and estate sales, where he collects photographs taken in the 1960s–80s. A young painter originally from South Central, Los Angeles, Broyard harbors a lifelong fascination for vintage items and a genuine care for old things. (In a conversation with Grant Wahlquist, he recalled with striking clarity the aesthetic of his grandmother’s house in 1989, and the way in which her house held that look long past the decade, preserving her choices of that time.) In Photoshop, he removes all of the figures from these found photos. For another painter this erasure might feel violent, but Broyard seems to say that, culturally, we overemphasize the figure and identity to determine meaning. He is far more interested in the life of a space, and how abstraction and translation can tender reflection on choice rather than circumstance.
Wandering through the abstracted living rooms and bedrooms of Henri Paul Broyard’s paintings feels a little like seeing a lover’s house for the first time. As viewers, we mentally push a fresh cigarette packet aside to better look at the curious yellow shape on the table. We notice the painting above a patterned couch and linger in its forms, anticipating insight into whoever hung the work. Moving into a bedroom, we peer past the royal blue and white striped duvet toward shelves adorned with brightly-colored trinkets, each of them holding a memory we’ll likely never fully know. Books beckon us because the covers are painted so exactingly, and more so because the titles have been omitted. These details tellingly remain quiet: ceramic or marble busts are faceless. Packages bear no logos. And while we feel we know these homes are lived in, we find no people. The paintings in Broyard’s TWELVE at Grant Wahlquist Gallery in Portland, Maine, invite us close and then, on the verge of recognition or embrace, intimacy is withheld. The absence of clear answers in these paintings is exactly what keeps us looking.
Broyard paints his interiors in a stiff, matter-of-fact way that keeps us at a distance and suggests these rooms and the objects in them are invented, taken, or memorized. In fact, he begins his work spending time in second-hand stores, thrift shops, and garage and estate sales, where he collects photographs taken in the 1960s–80s. A young painter originally from South Central, Los Angeles, Broyard harbors a lifelong fascination for vintage items and a genuine care for old things. (In a conversation with Grant Wahlquist, he recalled with striking clarity the aesthetic of his grandmother’s house in 1989, and the way in which her house held that look long past the decade, preserving her choices of that time.) In Photoshop, he removes all of the figures from these found photos. For another painter this erasure might feel violent, but Broyard seems to say that, culturally, we overemphasize the figure and identity to determine meaning. He is far more interested in the life of a space, and how abstraction and translation can tender reflection on choice rather than circumstance.
Wandering through the abstracted living rooms and bedrooms of Henri Paul Broyard’s paintings feels a little like seeing a lover’s house for the first time. As viewers, we mentally push a fresh cigarette packet aside to better look at the curious yellow shape on the table. We notice the painting above a patterned couch and linger in its forms, anticipating insight into whoever hung the work. Moving into a bedroom, we peer past the royal blue and white striped duvet toward shelves adorned with brightly-colored trinkets, each of them holding a memory we’ll likely never fully know. Books beckon us because the covers are painted so exactingly, and more so because the titles have been omitted. These details tellingly remain quiet: ceramic or marble busts are faceless. Packages bear no logos. And while we feel we know these homes are lived in, we find no people. The paintings in Broyard’s TWELVE at Grant Wahlquist Gallery in Portland, Maine, invite us close and then, on the verge of recognition or embrace, intimacy is withheld. The absence of clear answers in these paintings is exactly what keeps us looking.
Broyard paints his interiors in a stiff, matter-of-fact way that keeps us at a distance and suggests these rooms and the objects in them are invented, taken, or memorized. In fact, he begins his work spending time in second-hand stores, thrift shops, and garage and estate sales, where he collects photographs taken in the 1960s–80s. A young painter originally from South Central, Los Angeles, Broyard harbors a lifelong fascination for vintage items and a genuine care for old things. (In a conversation with Grant Wahlquist, he recalled with striking clarity the aesthetic of his grandmother’s house in 1989, and the way in which her house held that look long past the decade, preserving her choices of that time.) In Photoshop, he removes all of the figures from these found photos. For another painter this erasure might feel violent, but Broyard seems to say that, culturally, we overemphasize the figure and identity to determine meaning. He is far more interested in the life of a space, and how abstraction and translation can tender reflection on choice rather than circumstance.
Wandering through the abstracted living rooms and bedrooms of Henri Paul Broyard’s paintings feels a little like seeing a lover’s house for the first time. As viewers, we mentally push a fresh cigarette packet aside to better look at the curious yellow shape on the table. We notice the painting above a patterned couch and linger in its forms, anticipating insight into whoever hung the work. Moving into a bedroom, we peer past the royal blue and white striped duvet toward shelves adorned with brightly-colored trinkets, each of them holding a memory we’ll likely never fully know. Books beckon us because the covers are painted so exactingly, and more so because the titles have been omitted. These details tellingly remain quiet: ceramic or marble busts are faceless. Packages bear no logos. And while we feel we know these homes are lived in, we find no people. The paintings in Broyard’s TWELVE at Grant Wahlquist Gallery in Portland, Maine, invite us close and then, on the verge of recognition or embrace, intimacy is withheld. The absence of clear answers in these paintings is exactly what keeps us looking.
Broyard paints his interiors in a stiff, matter-of-fact way that keeps us at a distance and suggests these rooms and the objects in them are invented, taken, or memorized. In fact, he begins his work spending time in second-hand stores, thrift shops, and garage and estate sales, where he collects photographs taken in the 1960s–80s. A young painter originally from South Central, Los Angeles, Broyard harbors a lifelong fascination for vintage items and a genuine care for old things. (In a conversation with Grant Wahlquist, he recalled with striking clarity the aesthetic of his grandmother’s house in 1989, and the way in which her house held that look long past the decade, preserving her choices of that time.) In Photoshop, he removes all of the figures from these found photos. For another painter this erasure might feel violent, but Broyard seems to say that, culturally, we overemphasize the figure and identity to determine meaning. He is far more interested in the life of a space, and how abstraction and translation can tender reflection on choice rather than circumstance.
Installation views from Broyard's recent exhibtion "TWELVE" at Grant Wahlquist Gallery in Portland, Maine. Images courtesy of the gallery.
Reuse and appropriation appear in Broyard’s paintings through the thrifting process as well as an art historical one. References to art history teem in a mark-making lexicon that belies Broyard’s insistence that he doesn’t bring influence into his work. The visual lushness of Mickalene Thomas’s paintings of interiors, for example, glitter through Broyard’s playful manipulation of texture and collage-like perspective. The ecstatic marks that dance on the wall above a table full of scraps of paper and books in DJI (2017) freshly remember Cy Twombly’s gestural scribbles. We also see, perhaps, in Broyard’s HIJC (2017), a compositional nod to Kerry James Marshall’s "Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum" (1981), which he painted at roughly the same age as Broyard is now. (Marshall also originally hails from South Central). But this isn’t mere imitation: where Marshall problematizes invisibility and tensions of labor, Broyard’s painting trends toward leisure and time spent thinking, as suggested by the clutter of paper, cigarettes, and dinner on the coffee table. The painting within a painting that hovers, like a star, above the couch in HIJC is more of a sketch than Marshall’s self-portrait, a discrete work finished a year before Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum. Even so, the inclusion of these paintings within so many of the works in TWELVE is remarkable in scenes where so much else has been de-authored. The magic of Broyard’s approach lies in the way he intentionally obfuscates and erases the details of his sources to a point where we cannot determine with any certainty if these are found spaces or now Broyard’s.
Reuse and appropriation appear in Broyard’s paintings through the thrifting process as well as an art historical one. References to art history teem in a mark-making lexicon that belies Broyard’s insistence that he doesn’t bring influence into his work. The visual lushness of Mickalene Thomas’s paintings of interiors, for example, glitter through Broyard’s playful manipulation of texture and collage-like perspective. The ecstatic marks that dance on the wall above a table full of scraps of paper and books in DJI (2017) freshly remember Cy Twombly’s gestural scribbles. We also see, perhaps, in Broyard’s HIJC (2017), a compositional nod to Kerry James Marshall’s Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum (1981), which he painted at roughly the same age as Broyard is now. (Marshall also originally hails from South Central). But this isn’t mere imitation: where Marshall problematizes invisibility and tensions of labor, Broyard’s painting trends toward leisure and time spent thinking, as suggested by the clutter of paper, cigarettes, and dinner on the coffee table. The painting within a painting that hovers, like a star, above the couch in HIJC is more of a sketch than Marshall’s self-portrait, a discrete work finished a year before Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum. Even so, the inclusion of these paintings within so many of the works in TWELVE is remarkable in scenes where so much else has been de-authored. The magic of Broyard’s approach lies in the way he intentionally obfuscates and erases the details of his sources to a point where we cannot determine with any certainty if these are found spaces or now Broyard’s.
"DJI", Acrylic, Graphite, and Flashe on Canvas, 42" x 52", 2015. Image courtesy of Grant Wahlquist Gallery.
In contrast to the stark tangibility of his interiors, Broyard shapes his more purely abstract works with misty swipes of spray paint and an untethered, dream-like quality of mark-making. These paintings harken to the wilderness of gesture in mid-century Abstract Expressionism, but next to the heft of the more representational interiors they’re made to feel more like fabric swatches or landscape studies seen through venetian blinds. Which is not to say they’re less than: it is because they rub up against representation that they succeed in standing out. Broyard sophisticatedly grapples with socio-digital representation — a hallmark of so much work by millenials, with good reason — and his decision to eschew nostalgia, even when working with found source imagery, is the very thing that draws us in — and keeps us in — his paintings. Like the mechanics of “optimal differentiation” in music, Broyard’s penchant for re-authoring the vintage and historic catch us between the allure of the familiar and a hunger for what we don’t yet know.
The most compelling aspects of Broyard’s work lie in his uncynical curiosity and bare appreciation for painting. The more time we spend with these paintings, the more we are able to see that Broyard puts so much of himself in his work; it’s not nearly as coy as it might appear at first. In proposing that we define culture — and by extension ourselves — through what we make, he asks us to put effort to looking. TWELVE's most poignant effect is that it reminds us that we are viewers — and that to build relationships requires time, vulnerability, and reciprocity.
ABOUT HENRI PAUL BROYARD
Henri Paul Broyard received a B.F.A. in Drawing and Painting from the California College of the Arts in 2013. He attended the Klasse Peter Doig at the Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf, in 2014. His work has been included in exhibitions at: SOLA Art Gallery, Los Angeles; the School of Painting Hangzhou, China; Tom Dick or Harry, Dusseldorf; 41 Cooper Square Gallery, New York; Haphazard Gallery, Los Angeles; and 119 Essex Street, New York. His work has been featured in Surface and Studio Visit magazines. Broyard lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Courtesy of Grant Wahlquist Gallery.
ABOUT JENNA CROWDER
Jenna Crowder (b. 1985, San Bernardino, CA) is a Portland, Maine-based artist and writer. She is the Founding Editor of The Chart, an arts journal that aims to connect Maine artists to national and global contexts while offering specific regional perspectives to larger conversations. Jenna favors collaboration in her artistic practice, which extends across installation, printmaking, public practice, and curation to consider the convergence of written language and visual aesthetics. She is a co-creator, with writer Nadia Prupis, of MTV Crits!, a serial project which hosts themed music video screenings and socio-feminist pop culture critiques at art institutions, lingerie shops, and bars. Jenna has been awarded residencies from Hewnoaks Artist Colony, Ragdale Foundation, and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and project grants from the Kindling Fund and the Maine Arts Commission. She is a member of Pickwick Independent Press and the Portland Public Art Committee.
RESPONSE
A feature of project reviews experienced in person. Response will provide artists with much needed critical response to their work. Response is opinion-based but is not an op-ed.