Brooklyn-based artist Bret Slater installing ‘Gutter Gaunt Gangster’ at Liliana Bloch Gallery
BRET SLATER IS AUTHENTIC?TO HIMSELF, HIS WORK, AND THOSE WHO?VE INFLUENCED HIM.
BY TERRI PROVENCAL
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN SMITH
On the 5th day of January, Bret Slater was still wrestling with a title for a large painting. Leaning against a wall at Liliana Bloch Gallery, the work awaited installation for his solo show opening the next day. Titles mean a great deal to the artist, which he says are ?about things I?m experiencing. A lot of the time it?s influenced by music I?m listening to while I?m working, and things that I?m vibing?maybe even characters from books I?m reading.? Slater says Herman Hesse, the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist, poet, and painter, is one of his all-time favorites. An excerpt from Hesse?s Demian accompanies Slater?s exhibition. But there are also titles borrowed from the old British rock band, T. Rex, like Spaceball Ricochet. ?His titles are really good, funky, and just so fresh,? says gallerist Liliana Bloch.
This is the artist?s first time showing with Bloch who says they?ve been talking about doing a show together for a year and a half. ?I?ve always been very intrigued by his work and have followed his career for several years now.? A native New Yorker, Slater received his MFA from Southern Methodist University and was once a Dallas-based art darling, beguiling collectors at every level with his small-scale works, first exhibited by the much-missed Marty Walker Gallery and later with Holly Johnson. It?s been a couple of years since he?s had a show here, and it?s good to have him back. Effortlessly earnest, we?ve missed his arresting tattoos, inexhaustible energy, and mostly his work.
Through February 10, Bret Slater displays the demure paintings for which he is known, though void of the remembered bright colors, in addition to three large canvases. The show is described as a ?dynamic shift in both scale and technique for the artist.? While all the paintings are uniquely Slater, the sizeable canvases are something he?s just come back to over the past couple of years. ?You get to miss making larger work.? He reveals previous attempts were not, in his mind, successful. ?But for my first solo show with Marty (Walker), I did have a larger work painted thickly on raw canvas. That was successful, but a different technique.?
The artist is influenced by pop culture, but also describes his paintings as ?inanimate souls.? He says, ?The small scale of the paintings, their materiality, and their color all relate. They all connect to a certain physicality of a certain kind of thing. Where does painting meet this rubber action figure that I treasured as a kid and carried in my backpack? Where do painting and that kind of affinity meet for a toy as a kid? It?s the handheld space, like the experience of reading a book. I think books may impact me more than any other kind of media. Maybe. It?s all this content in this one physical shell.?
The artist could certainly maintain a fruitful career dedicated entirely to his 10-inch-and-under misshapen, modern color fields with paint overlapping the edges. Solo shows across the globe have mounted each year since he graduated from SMU?Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland. The artist?s application of acrylic mixed with medium to create conceptual, yet approachable, rubbery, soapy-like objects are highly collected, but that alone would be too confining for him. ?I thought for years about how I could make large paintings again. And my whole working space, my whole mental working zone, became like this box in front of me, and it was just too small. It became like confining myself. I needed to break open again. I wanted to use my body and my arms and legs to make work. I want to make big things. I want to break out of this small shell.?
While he dabbled in going large, he was not feeling the same intimacy, then something ancillary stirred him. ?In 2014, I was giving a talk for the series Artists on Artwork at The Met on Kenneth Noland and Paul Feeley. They are two of my first favorite painters and a lot of their buddies: Helen Frankenthaller, Morris Louis?the Color Field painters,? he says excitedly. ?I was giving this talk about painting in general and as I?m talking it hit me: That?s how I can make large work; it?s to just make paintings in the same way they made paintings with watered-down, stained acrylic on raw canvas. And it could work, and I could use my own compositions.? He said he had resisted their methods ?out of respect and desire to let that be its own moment in history and to always strive for originality.?
So, after the talk, the young artist peacefully succumbed to the old adage that nothing is original. ?You have to come to this realization, I think, as a maker that you can?t be a maker and be 100% original. It?s just not possible. There is no completely pure format. Everything you?re doing has a foregrounding in history already. And that?s a difficult thing to deal with as a contemporary artist. You have to wrestle with that.? Slater is nothing if not soulful. Everything around him affects him, and his palette is more subdued this time around. He?s a thinker, though an extroverted one with an easy smile. ?Two years later I decided to embrace it and try to make these large works. The materials are the same but used differently with a lot of water instead of medium, and applied differently.?
He gestures to the matte-brown and purple-stained painting he had struggled with titling. ?These are stained with a brush.? The work, relieved of the same texture, is still instantly recognizable as the artist?s. ?I think it?s going to be Gutter Gaunt Gangster after lyrics from a T. Rex song.? On the opening day of Slater?s show, the late T. Rex frontman, Marc Bolan, would have been proud. P