Art Reviews
Artifact Gallery New York
Mague's "Logos" Exhibition, ARTIFACT, New York City, 5-22 June 2024
Postmodern Dreamscapes of Mague Brewer’s
By David Zimmerman
Mague Brewer’s multimedia paintings, prints and constructions are postmodern works which reference the world of the Renaissance as well as the twentieth century Modern Art through psychological tenor and spatial elisions and juxtapositions. This overall admixture of styles and unfolding of the pictorial elements makes the artist’s efforts a particularly good example of contemporary work through its hybridity postmodern spirit. This, famously, has been characterized by Jean-François Lyotard as “refin[ing] our sensitivity to differences and reinforc[ing] our ability to tolerate the incommensurable.”
Mague Brewer’s art allows the viewer to circumnavigate in a symbolic world in which the imaginary and the real are seamlessly merged. Her technique, so stylistically predetermined in its exactitude, is perfectly suited to sideswipe the viewer with a deadpanned presentation of the inexplicable and the unforeseen. In the entire artist’s oeuvre there are many slyly enchanting examples of stylistic legerdemain to appreciate if one is prepared to give the work its due in terms of time.
How remarkable, for example, to see spatial play in The Moment or minimal compression in Tempus Fugit where energy rests on the identification with the element of resistance as a chief component. The most evident aspect of these works is the remarkable freedom the artist is capable of unleashing as well as the careful registration of marks and patterning that coalesce into an overall image a dreamlike recollection.
Mague Brewer’s technique demands clarity of purpose and lucidity in terms of formal stylistics. It is always threatened, conceptually, by its interaction with the forceful unintelligibility of the dreamscape. Here the Freudian Übersetzung, or displacement, or transposition, or substitution perpetually allows a process of symbolization to take place. Yet this process, paradoxically, is perpetually being transposed.
The result is a sense of indeterminancy which hovers over the work. The technique offers the viewer a bracing image, which recalls an archeological condition in which time is sensed as a residue of psychic substrata, yet as something that is continuously being rebuilt on another. Pictorial language as a means of summing up the constraining forces of social and private behavior. In this sense the Brewer’s art is symptomatic of our age that attempts to destabilize our understanding of the so-called hierarchies of human experience in order that the “suchness” of life can be felt in all of its intensity.
As we peer into the artist’s magical worlds intelligibility and unintelligibility are locked in a mutual embrace. This accounts for the extreme suggestiveness in his multi-leveled art. For in the artist’s pictorial spaces and places the viewer discovers a vibrant and mysterious sense of in potentia which is the key to the overall authority and singularity of Mague Brewer’s work transcending stylistics as well as time, space and place.
Mague's Exhibition, Kate Oh Gallery,
New York, 16 - 27 May 2023
Mague Brewer's Greenbergian Odyssey: A Modern Tribute to Medium and Perception
"Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye."
Now, should you find yourself at the intersection of Madison Avenue and E72nd Street this week, a visit to the Kate Oh Gallery will plunge you into Mague Brewer’s vivid tableau – an odyssey brimming with color and form. In an intimate exhibition space on the floor floor, these canvases throb with vitality, whilst their abstract contours and strokes weave a visual dialect that communicates directly with the senses, which are more than fitting for the title of this show: Tactile Effects. Hence, as one navigates through Brewer’s physical creations, it shall be impossible to overlook the heartfelt invitation to touch the very medium of painting that lies at the heart of her creations.
Clement Greenberg, a towering figure in the world of art criticism and an ardent advocate of Modernism, once opined, “the essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” Brewer’s latest works subtly embody this philosophy, employing a diverse arsenal of techniques that probe the core essence of painting, while simultaneously emphasizing its intrinsic qualities—flatness, color, and the canvas’s rectangular shape.
In the exhibit, which will be on view for only a few weeks, Brewer’s application of paint appears as a celebration of the materiality of her chosen medium. The symphony of color, traversing the spectrum from azure-topaz blues to cerulean greens, engenders a phenomenological experience in the viewer, inciting a depth of feeling rather than a mere visual perception. So remember this: Instead of jarring the viewer’s experience, these elements serve to enrich it. These components hum with life, their irregular shapes resonating against the canvas, coaxing the viewer into a realm of perceptual riddles.
Greenberg asserted, rather presciently, that “the task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art.” Brewer’s work is a luminous testament to this principle. Her paintings, whether they skew towards the abstract or the figurative, and often pendulating between the two like a gyroscopic experiment, are wholly self-referential. They refrain from imitation or borrowing from other mediums, instead, they exalt in the inherent qualities of painting’s surface.
Brewer’s chief contribution resides in her ability to manipulate color to evoke a tactile sensation. This aspect of her work aligns seamlessly with Greenbergian principles. It ought to be pointed out that the critic once noted, “Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine oneself walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye.” Brewer’s works ensnare the viewer, their colors and forms initiating a visual journey of exploration.
Among the intimate works on view at the Kate Oh Gallery, the works “Dunstable” and “We All Deserve Our Own Garden,” specifically, constitute typical testaments to her growth as an artist, embodying in a lyrical way the principles of Modernism and Greenberg’s theories. Indeed, her quintessential ability to manipulate color to create a sense of tactility and depth adheres to the Modernist notion that the illusion created by the artist is one that the viewer can only travel through with the eye.
Mague Brewer’s art is a vibrant homage to painting, a colorful expedition through form and hue that both challenges and enthralls the viewer. Her work stands as a quiet witness to the potency of her chosen medium, as if resulting in a nautical exploration of the inherent qualities of Modernism itself. To both the novice and the connoisseur, her artistic journey, spanning continents and decades, is an adventure. From her birthplace in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico, to her artistic awakening in Russia, to her stylistic evolution in London and New York, Brewer’s work is imbued with a richness and complexity that invites exploration.
B. Su Alexander, PhD
Review: Exhibition at Kate Oh Gallery New York 16-27 May 2023
Mague's Tactile Effects
In works like “The Chord” (El Cordon De Plata) and Whenever and Wherever, Mague is at her most effective —suggesting uneven horizontal and vertical constituents of the pictureplane that bleed and float. The act of suggestion, not pointing, is here more pronounced than those works where straightforward silhouettes come to the fore (e.g., Mague’s outlines of overlapped faces or straightforward orbular eyes with penetrating gazes).
With Mague’s abstractions, we are held in abeyance, such that the materiality of the linen canvas bubbles and brews. In Wherever and Whenever, the vertical towers are turned ninety degrees and primed into ten hoary-tipped lines that fade into a dot. This is an act of directing the stage into perspectival fading. One can readily see how parcels of sheen-slated white reflect like the sun flitting over glossed paper or glass; but this slating-effect occurs in horizontal and vertical stripes that also prime the viewer’s to the canvas at hand. The hatched lattices of the linen complement the vertical-and-horizontal ambiguous blocks that I have suggested as doors-without-knobs and windows-without-locks; one need not pursue the Jungian symbolism here, just the canonization of experience.
That is Mague’s great modernist move, looking backwards at Greenbergian considerations of the canvas-as-object, of that which is intrinsic to painting as such. This is somewhat anachronistic pursuit — especially so if we consider the putative post-historical era of art inaugurated by Dadaists like Duchamp but reaching its apotheosis with Warhol, where the Romantic-cum-post-modernist conceit of the verbal-discursive idea of art had overtaken the endeavor of perceptually discernibles.
The dreamscape miasma feels too easy an anchor, and there is something much more formal at play here; like the Abstract Expressionists of yore, the Surrealist inclination is here rejected, though parcels of Matta-esque automatism are retained. It is in Mague’s color that her illusory method reaches it great tactile effect. Instead of the graying of color that recedes into the distance, — which, in his unfinished manuscript, “The Artist’s Reality” (discovered among his papers in 1988), Rothko identified with the “illusory painters” —Mague is a tactile painter who achieves the quality of tactility through color value. It is this manipulation of color value that Mague wholeheartedly lays claim to, twisting and mending it along two pursuits: one sharp and realist, the other clouded and abstract.