In 1912, Egon Schiele wrote on the side of a drawing the phrase «Art cannot be modern. Art returns to be eternally at the origin»; about seventy years later, the art critic Jean Clair used this quote as the opening of the chapter ‘The Classic and the Concrete’.[1] It is precisely in this context that the necessary ability of the artist to innovate from the past is discussed – not by emulating it, but by drawing from its most significant traces, thus initiating a process of renaissance, either through the use of a specific technical and stylistic primitivism or through a spontaneous fascination with the state of things in the primordial nature. This return to the past, which does not aim to consolidate what has happened (otherwise, it would lead to a forced regression), announces the advent of the new. In this temporal progression, Brian Scott Campbell’s research finds its place. The works displayed in the exhibition titled Fable, scheduled at Richter Gallery in Rome until March 7th, 2025, bear similarities to the naïve primitive painting from the last two decades of the 19th century, which is characterized by a deliberately naive approach that intentionally renounces the use of perspective.
Brian Scott Campbell, “Fable”, installation view, Galleria Richter Fine Art, courtesy Richter Fine Art, Roma, ph. credit Eleonora Cerri Pecorella
In the exhibited works, the constant flatness goes beyond the construction of a conventional reality, thus favoring the creation of fable-like, primordial and archaic visions. In these places, where everything is built through rigidity and clumsiness, the principle of assembling a flat collage return, developing allover with regular and pure geometric forms distinguished by a formal straightforwardness. The canvases feature simple and immediate subjects, such as characters in action or fragments of quiet, provincial landscapes, peculiar for their simple anonymity. The artist eliminates details to focus on the pure reproduction of the simple concrete subject: the sea, remaining still as lead, is shaped as if it had just come out of a sculptor’s hand, and the sky, frozen in pink and orange tones, is improbably unreal.
Brian Scott Campbell, “Duck pond” and “Turtle doves”, flashe and acrylic on canvas, 50 x 40 cm, 2024, courtesy Richter Fine Art, Roma, ph. credit Eleonora Cerri Pecorella
All of this makes us think of how the depicted belongs to a fable. Thus, the only inhabitants of these scenes appear as unknown figures, lacking eyes, mouth and nose, but still alive. Indeed, for various and unmistakable reasons, what Campbell proposes in this second solo exhibition highlights a search that is certainly consistent with the first exhibition project from 2022. Specifically, the need to characterize a logical and pictorial rigor in the formations is constant, as it involves a natural desire for order and geometry, giving each form its own placement and thus inducing a concrete balance. Yet, unlike what happened during his first project, it appears changed – not so much because, as the artist points out, the works mark a return to the presence of human figures, but rather due to an experimental use of the ‘flashe’[2] technique, with the resulting variation of tones based on a few warm modulations and a marked archaic quality of the shapes.
Brian Scott Campbell, “Agent” and “Parish”, flashe and acrylic on canvas, 40 x 50 cm, 2024, courtesy Richter Fine Art, Roma, ph. credit Eleonora Cerri Pecorella
Furthermore, the colors, which are predominantly orange, purple and green, are not used in correspondence with what is real. For instance, the tires of a car will absurdly be blue, and the sky above a house yellow. This freedom of color allows Campbell to be strongly visionary, dreamlike and ever hungry for his own dreamlike memory. Even the infinite variety of geometric blocks, which interlock naturally as if they were forms of porous limestone, suggest linear paths that offer the possibility of rationally measuring the artist’s imagination. Thus, by using memory and his own visual assumptions, Campbell arrives at what is most unreal: the form is generated by a voluntary forgetting, so that memory becomes the first useful tool of invention. And even though today we are aware that technologies have led to a passive and automated perception of prefab images, which do not do justice to the complexity of human life, for Campbell, painting equals marking a number, measuring and weighing a balanced geometric harmony that, at first glance, appears as the object of a preordained and simplified fable.
Brian Scott Campbell, “Lift”, flashe and acrylic on canvas, 60 x 75 cm, 2024, courtesy Richter Fine Art, Rome, ph. credit Eleonora Cerri Pecorella
This unprecedented ability for synthesis leads the artist to treat landscapes through volumes that install and unfold with their own forms: the thin colored bands at the edges of the works frame the subject as in theatrical backdrops, the colors are flat, the tree crowns treated as cones, the clouds take on particular visual profiles and the suns appear as funny yellow spots. It is in these settings that the figures take their place and come to life, not to tell specific actions but to reveal possession of that environment. The figurative element thus tells of a robotic humanity typical for geometric forms, which move not by actions but by directions, in the simplicity of a theatrical and fairytale-like act that is interchangeable, because the shape of a head is the same one used for the construction of a house. Additionally, the preparatory background to the canvas, often applied with an orange tint, tends to make the painted areas vibrate, and the particular ‘flashe’ technique gives an infinite alteration to the surfaces, which appear abraded and porous.
Brian Scott Campbell, “Chameleon” and “Suite”, flashe and acrylic on canvas, 35 x 27 cm, 2025, courtesy Richter Fine Art, Roma, ph. credit Eleonora Cerri Pecorella
Without a doubt, Campbell’s practice is certainly one of repetition and its continuous variation. Therefore, it is interesting to ask, within this different and simply geometric ensemble: what role the human figure that inhabits it plays? We all dream through memory and imagination, creating a chain of circumstances that stimulate vision. With Campbell, the human figure, despite the descriptive dryness of the landscapes, is represented and outlined as in a Chinese shadow theater, where the flat, cut-out and calmly animated shapes are painted with the fresh intuition of an artist seemingly new to painting. So much so that the artist’s approach to painting is a happy combination of solids, a workshop of the counting sticks used in childhood, from which a coherent and concrete world is generated, regulated by specific measures and geometric laws.
Brian Scott Campbell, “Fable”, installation view, Galleria Richter Fine Art, courtesy Richter Fine Art, Roma, ph. credit Eleonora Cerri Pecorella
Thus, in all his works, there is a trace of a primitive construction of forms: working like a sculptor when drawing a house, taking on the guise of a surveyor when outlining a tree, a mechanic when composing the structure of a car, only to finally reveal himself as a painter in the drastic choice to abandon perspective effects and in the treatment of the painted masses. This reduction leads Campbell to treat the canvas like a hollow mold, stripping it of its fundamental privilege, that is, possessing a complete space built on three dimensions. In this way, without fear, the artist returns to painting through a technical and visionary archaism, creating the dimension of a mythical elsewhere through radical forms, certainly worthy of a contemporary primitive.
[1] Jean Clair, Il classico e il concreto, in Considerazioni sullo stato delle belle arti, Abscondita, Milano, 2018, p. 83.
[2] The term ‘flashe’ refers to an opaque vinyl-based painting medium that emulates the appearance of fresco technique.
Info:
Brian Scott Campbell. Fable.
Galleria Richter Fine Art, Vicolo del Curato, 3, 00186, Roma
28/01/2025 – 07/3/2025
Orari: dal lunedì al sabato dalle 15 alle 19, o su appuntamento
www.galleriarichter.com
Maria Vittoria Pinotti (1986, San Benedetto del Tronto) is an art historian, author, and independent critic. She currently is the coordinator of Claudio Abate’s photographic archive and Manager at Elena Bellantoni’s Studio. From 2016 to 2023 she was the Gallery Manager in a gallery in the historic center of Rome. She has worked with ministerial offices such as the General Secretariat of the Ministry of Culture and the Central State Archive. Currently, she collaborates with cultural sector magazines, focusing on in-depth thematic studies dedicated to modern and contemporary art.
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