David Bromfield

1996 Delaney Gallery review

Bob Brighton's work at the Delaney Galleries invites a completely different gaze. His paintings are unstretched pieces of raw hessian, cotton and flax - sandwiched together, soaked in colour and pinned directly to the gallery wall.

This form of display emphasises the clotted textures of each piece of material so that the surface is unavoidable.

Brighton achieves a most remarkable presence with apparently minimal means. His panels of pure, dense colour, big and small, seem to have grown to their exact shape and size. Simple as they are, they radiate an optical presence that is almost erotic in it's intensity.

For instance, as one enters the gallery, one sees a single sheet of medium brown flax, covered in gold acrylic paint, pinned by it's corners to the wall beyond the semi-circular arch opposite. The religious and contemplative allusions of this set up are obvious, but they do not explain the power of the work.

Closer examination shows just how carefully Brighton has crafted the painted surface across the tooth of the cloth so that the weave just remains visible. The gold and brown set each off perfectly.

The cloth still bears folds an creases which catch the light and add to the impression of something fragile and fleeting, yet with an unimaginably dense presence in the eye and memory.

Brighton is a consummate orchestrator of colour and texture. Works made up in small panels line the corridor to the right shoulder high. One has six units, each made up of a small panel of knotted or texture material superimposed on a slightly bigger piece to produce an illusory framing effect which is almost Baroque.

Simultaneously, one sees the surface as a whole and as two interrelated parts. Each has been soaked in silver and gold, modulated and scumbled with various colours to produce muted green and purple greys, with occasional echoes of resonant pink.

In the main gallery, Brighton experiments with big groups of painted rectangles set up in a single work as a gridded rectangle. He is able to hold the most disparate colours together by means of texture and occasionally a little pattern.

David Bromfield
Perth, Australia
1992