The Lingering Immaterialities of William Brovelli [excerpt]
By Dominique Nahas
William Brovelli’s Timeline Canvases are a uniform 30 x 40 inch size on which is applied a grid format with 1,034 sections. This becomes the available ground on which the artist can chose to inscribe what appear to be abstract shapes using micro-gestural scribbling that recall language systems, doodles, or vestigial body parts, unraveled and dissipated. These forms are what remain of an original motif Brovelli had been using for a few years— a form that has in the past resembled a tiny upright androgynous figure. Repeated figures (or what is left of them—Brovelli refers to them now as “characters”) have little overt resemblance to the original motif. These tiny marks, like nerve-endings, are repeatedly, exhaustingly, inscribed on the grid in ball point ink with a mantra-like continuity that always seems to break down, devolving into entropic globs or specks or squiggly ovals that are reminiscent of retinal floaters (a neurological phenomenon Brovelli has long been fascinated by) or parts of heads or torsos. These forms (or part-forms) sink below the surfaces of his canvases. They create sensations of muffled drift, dissolution, fragility. The characters appear and reappear, immaterial and ghost-like, reminiscent of what the artist compares to as “…stuff that has been buried here as twigs under ice.” The characters are placed within washy vertical blocks or trails measuring 1 ½ inch high and ¼ inch wide made by using a brush dipped in a transparent ink wash. Each of these ineffable demarcations— each tiny space of intensity— Brovelli terms a “cell” – a wondrously ambivalent term perfect for its positive and negative inferences. This term has biologic connotations, implying growth and change. The other implication, that of solitude (a monk’s cell), punitive incarceration (lock-down) offers us a mental space or condition in which repetitive, if not ritualistic, motions or movements are initiated while “doing time” in the service of Our Lord or The Man. This term, “cell” also gives us notice of William Brovelli’s “attitudinal gestures” that are part of his art. It offers us a hint of his wrestling with deterministic leanings and of his long-term ponderings on accountability and responsibility and their relationship to freedom, change and annihilation.
Dominique Nahas is an independent curator and critic based in New York City. He teaches critical studies at Pratt Institute and is a critique faculty member of the New York Studio Program. He is the 2009-2010 Critic-in-Residence at Maryland Institute College of Art’s Hoffberger Graduate School.
The Lingering Immaterialities of William Brovelli by Dominique Nahas © 2010
Tags: art, art criticism, conceptual art, Determinism, Dominique Nahas, essay, Kim Foster Gallery, minimal art, process art, termite art, William Brovelli
