The Many Faces of William Brickel
BY SIMON CHILVERS
William Brickel’s elongated, sometimes contorted, often intense figures, possess an ambiguous beauty that are bluntly modern, nod to 16th-century mannerist styling, and offer a whiff of Paul Cadmus, Lucian Freud or even Egon Schiele. Mostly though they hold your eye with their strong and distinctive presence, crackling with feeling, pulling you in with their mysterious sets and clothes in colors fit for a Prada moodboard.
With a new solo show, “Was It Ever Fair,” having just opened at Michael Kohn in Los Angeles (following last autumn’s “Not the Whole Truth, but Only a Bit of It” at The Artist Room in London), there is buzz and momentum circulating Brickel. At just 29, the artist looks genuinely agog—and rather like the characters in his paintings—as he recounts the fact that several works sold right in front of him at the opening.
This latest body of work, a mix of large meaty oil paintings—such as the gloriously pink “The Pink Room”—and a series of more intimate but striking works on paper in charcoal or watercolor, were all created specifically for this show. “Once they’re in the space, the work removes itself from me,” says Brickel, whose paintings evolve from his own memories, “which I like because then people can reflect their own feelings or narratives onto it.”
Not that it isn’t complicated to part with the work, he acknowledges. But once you do, “you can’t then really remember all the in-depth-ness that went into them, so you have to try and do another one to work it all out again,” he says. “For a while, I toyed with the idea of them just living their own lives when they’ve been sold. I imagine in the night, the characters might jump out of the paintings and start walking around.”
Brickel grew up in Gloucestershire, England, in public housing. His first childhood recollection is of a “surreal” Punch & Judy puppet show. He can still visualize how big his mother’s hands were in comparison to his own body, a detail that partly explains why his figures’ hands are so large and omnipresent in his work. His parents separated when he was around 10. He recalls vividly the decor of his mother’s home being “floral everything, including the light switches, which had a huge effect on me, and is where the pink rooms come from.”
Briefly training as a car mechanic, Brickel eventually went to Camberwell College of the Artsin London where he graduated with a BA in photography; he loved to photograph the places that he now paints, but hates having his photograph taken. He completed his MA at the Royal Drawing School in London where his passion for drawing crystallized. Brickel admires the work of Edward Burra. He “observed so much from sitting in a bar or a club, and I love that process myself,” Brickel says. “And you don’t quite know where you stand in his pictures.”
A show of Henry Fuseli’s paintings in Paris also resonated strongly with the young artist for their “strangeness and exuberant imagination.” He says: “Often there are these moments of dead flesh and these white figures, and you don’t know if they’re spirits or limp lifeless people or specters in the night, it’s all there for you to experience. That’s what I want from my paintings, for people to just come to it and experience it.”
Brickel’s preoccupation with reinterpreting his own past—he says sometimes he is painting himself remembering a version of himself—are at the heart of why his work reads ambiguously. “My characters are just that, they are characters, ever changing yet somewhat the same. They morph from person to person, never resting on someone in particular,” explains Brickel. “But also simultaneously they are someone particular, or me or not me but someone else, a shifting soup of personality.”
Brickel is mostly unconcerned with literal evaluations. For some, an earlier painting, “Two Thinking,” which features two topless figures entwined in grey sheets, “is a very sexual picture.” But others might see “friends, people bring things to work—and that’s where I love to leave it. Without the ambiguousness it wouldn’t be me, and you wouldn’t have all those tensions and vibrations.” Does he see the work as queer? “It’s been a question that has been presented to me over and over again but I’d quite like to leave people to deliberate. If there is a queerness that people see then it must be there but I have neglected to explore those actions I suppose, but not the thoughts.”
Brickel has strong feelings about clothes and will obsess about what he is wearing at length, though in his paintings the clothing is harder to explain; the pink socks in “Alone in a Dark Room” are for Brickel merely about what his character needed. “It’s like they dictate themselves. I’m a conduit for those parades of fashion.” One exception is the baby blue shirt with orange check in ‘Bunting and Light’ which is based on an old Ben Sherman design worn by his father.
Brickel describes a striped rugby top captured in “Spectator #5” as the kind of “quintessentially English” attire you’d see at a steam fair in Gloucestershire. The artist frequents these fairs most summers and is drawn to the extraordinary characters he sees there. “I’m constantly flitting between people and for split second your mind can give a character to someone,” explains Brickel.
Brickel says that even though he knows when a work is finished, he is often surprised by it. “You add color next to color and you’re surprised by it. You add a line, you’ll be surprised by it. That’s the joy of painting, I suppose,” he says. “You seek things that are surprising. Sometimes it's pink socks or an orange jumper, you do it to experiment, and to be surprised.”
“Was It Ever Fair” is on view at Michael Kohn gallery through March 2nd.