Joe Brittain

Cuevas Tilleard is proud to present Qualia, a solo installation by Joe Brittain. The show comprises a painting and sculpture by the artist.

Using sculpture as a way to ask fundamental questions about human sensibility, Brittain's work creates situations and dialogues probing our relationship to and placement within the material world, and it's deep, incomprehensible history. In part scientific, in part historical and in part spiritual, his works are an exploration of natural, essential materials, all with their own unique and complicated pasts, brought together in focused, yet simplified forms. Confounding expectations, the works reveal the inner search for oneself and others.

The title of the exhibition, Qualia, is drawn from an ancient term for the internal perception of sensations external to our bodies. In these works, Brittain utilizes classical practices of carved marble sculpture and painting with ground pigments. The blue pigment used here is ground lapis lazuli, originally named by Italian sea traders as ultra-marino, "beyond the sea". Because the material was found in only one remote part of Afghanistan, the pigment was rare and thus highly valuable. Because of this, it was used as the color of divine wrath and spiritual revelation. The history of the color and it's inherent implication of value, based on its scarcity and the dangers involved in cultural exchange, are used here to enhance the sublime imagery of the painting; a storm at sea.

Along with the painting, there sits a solitary, abstracted portrait bust, caught within this vast and roiling landscape. The figure is a nod to another traditional motif; the lone figure within a sublime landscape. The hard and roughly chiseled stone gives only an impression of a head and neck. The sculpture's chaotic energy, caught in a process of becoming, mirroring the painting's raw energy.

Speaking within the coded language of art history, Brittain creates an abstracted scene as an ode to our desire to lose ourselves in the wonder of sensation provided by the natural world and the paradoxical and meditative focus that can come from this act.