Paintings

This full-color catalog offers a selection of Michael Brophy's recent oil paintings with an essay by Charles D'Ambrosio. "Most of Brophy's landscapes are obviously wrecked, but there's no nostalgia for the olden days, no melancholy, no sappy loss, largely because there's also no initial shock. Ruin is painted as if it were eternal, as if there were nothing to recover, as if beauty persists, generous and spacious, even when the landscape of our longing does not. Looking at his paintings you don't get to pull out your wisdom or wistful regret or revisionist insights or any of the other consolations people apply as a patch to the broken world. You don't get to stand back, hoping for a better view. His work holds us in place, keeps us motionless, transfixed by an arrangement of harmonies that don't add up, that offer an artistic calm but no ethical or social way out." ~ Charles D'Ambrosio