CASPER BRINDLE

CASPER BRINDLE

Casper Brindle self-avowedly carries on a tradition of transcendence. A second-generation Light & Space (and less directly Finish/Fetish) artist all but native to southern California (he moved here with his family from Canada at the age of six), Brindle has experienced the same atmospheric phenomena and encountered the same space-age materials his Light & Space predecessors did. Further, as a studio assistant to Eric Orr, Brindle was in direct contact with leading Light & Space artists from a relatively early age. Among the large and growing cadre of younger “perceptualists” (as Robert Irwin prefers to call them), Brindle is notable for his close regard not just for the tendency’s reliance on optical effect, but for the austerity of its formal language.

And it is in that formal language that Brindle poses the abstract, even metaphysical questions that give his art its particular presence and vitality. Brindle’s art turns our attention to its minimalist composition as much through as despite its luminous, disembodied color and pristine, machine-tooled surfaces. He does not set our eyes afloat in unvariegated light, but thwarts such an optical free fall, deliberately compromising the “ganzfeld” – the surrounding light ambience – with strongly posited horizontal and/or vertical devices. These structural devices encourage our eyes to apprehend the visual field either as a recessional space or as a surface structure. Or both (in an especially intricate overlay of vertical on horizontal).

Notably, the elements that constitute the horizontal and vertical presences in Brindle’s paintings do not funcDon equally, or at least in the same planar context. The horizontals are entirely incised or “drawn,” scored across panels whose otherwise pristine expanses of color are not simply interrupted, but disrupted, by the edge-to-edge horizon lines. The lines seem to punch a fold into the underlying expanses, a kind of double-recession whose upper and lower segments mirror each other. (This reading becomes even more complex with the presence of several horizontals.) Meanwhile, the much thicker but much more abbreviated vertical elements are physically projective, sculptural manifestations that reassert the facture, the materiality, of Brindle’s method. At the same time, they dazzle and bamboozle the eye with their incandescence. These elevated dolmen at once burgeon forth in relief and float out beyond the apparent surface plane of the paintings – sculptures? – as they dissolve in their own radiance.

Thus, Brindle’s verticals are doing one thing, or set of things, while his horizontals are doing another. In fact, the two forms are operating in mutually exclusive compositional, not to menDon perceptual, contexts. Brindle does not set up an ongoing dialogue between vertical and horizontal works, or even between the verticals and the horizontals occurring in the same works; rather, he proposes the physical and metaphysical presence of each from the outset as contrasting discourses. This is not Light & Space, it is Light With Space.

We can’t avoid the spiritual dynamic, esoteric and otherwise, that inevitably pertains to the axial relationship of vertical and horizontal, and Brindle knows that. Indeed, it is that presumption, and its myriad interpretations, that he challenges. From the ancients’ quadratic division of the universe to the iconography of modern Christianity, the contraposition of vertical and horizontal functions as a fundamental principle. In particular, the elaborations of late 19th century neo-religious thought latched onto such a powerful formal dialectic, inspiring the emergence of abstract art. (Piet Mondrian, for one, regarded the horizontal factors in his Neo Plastic paintings as female and the vertical as male.) Brindle does not discourage such thought per se, but he proposes a condition of perception in which each factor not only operates in, but helps establish, its discrete universe.

Unlike his modernist forebears, then, Casper Brindle does not propound the establishment or translation of an extra-visual symbology. He presents basic formal, and perceptual, phenomena as themselves. A line is a line; an aura is an aura; they have meaning only as they affect us optically. The transcendence possible in and from the viewer’s experience of Brindle’s work is not promulgated as a spiritual response but as a perceptual one. Of course, the perception of such formulaDons, and especially of their seemingly magical conjuration, can lead viewers to epiphanies of many kinds. But what Brindle seeks to demonstrate is a kind of art-making that is as direct and common, universal and self-referential as a sunrise or a seashore, an art-making that goes back to the origins of aesthetic regard.

Peter Frank
Los Angeles
August 2022

Casper Brindle grew up surfing the beaches along LA's coast during the 1970's and 80's, and worked for Light and Space artist, Eric Orr, in the late 1980’s. His work is in the permanent collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation in Malibu, CA and has been exhibited at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, CA the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, CA. 

EXHIBITIONS
LIGHT | GLYPHS
CrossCurrents
All Together Now
Casper Brindle: A Selection of Unique Works on Paper
Casper Brindle: Recent Works
DEEP WATER
Aura & Strata
CHROMA

MEDIA
INCONVERSATION: Casper Brindle
AUTRE MAGAZINE
ARGONAUT NEWS
ANGELENO MAGAZINE
ART NOW LA
ART DAILY
MINNESOTA STREET PROJECT
ARTLAND
FABRIK MAGAZINE
MALIBU ARTS JOURNAL
VISUAL ART SOURCE
WHITE HOT MAGAZINE
ART LTD
WHITE HOT MAGAZINE
LIQUID SALT MAGAZINE