David Brody   Planet of the Archbuilders 27 May - 27 June, 2005 Opening: Friday, 27 May, 7-9p     Invitation image   Planet of the Archbuilders: O, 2005 Gouache on paper 30 x 22 inches       Planet of the Archbuilders: E, 2005 Gouache on paper 30 x 22 inches       Planet of the Archbuilders: G, 2005 Gouache on paper 22 x 30 inches       Planet of the Archbuilders: I, 2005 Gouache on paper 22 x 30 inches       Planet of the Archbuilders: K, 2005 Gouache on paper 22 x 30 inches       Using gouache on paper to improvise infinite possibilities, David Brody has developed the works for his second solo exhibition at Pierogi. Brody works these paintings through sheer observation of his own process, encouraging a serendipity that allows for change and ends in discovery. Brody writes...   To our eyes the great works of such artists as Piranesi, John Martin, Frederick Church, Claude, and J.M.W.Turner would be dramatic enough without awkward little humans scurrying around. It strikes me that this inability to render a convincing figure is actually the sign by which we can tell that their superb rocks, ruins, trees, clouds and crags are, essentially, raw structural conjuring—driven by the mark first and by any specific logic of depiction afterward. At any rate, this is my own painting method: from the mark outward, and to the myopic degree that if I arrive at any luminosity or spatial coherence at all it seems strange and miraculous. All the more unthinkable, by this improvisation, is narrative—yet in some distilled, 200 proof, "visionary" sense, narrative is exactly what I'm after. Perhaps it's envy, then, that prompts me to graft a suggestive literary phrase onto my current paintings. I first considered re-using a Martin grandiloquence like "The Great Day of His Wrath," or "Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion," but as temptingly apt for our apocalyptic moment as these might be, my paintings are somewhat more temperate. Meanwhile, a phrase from Jonathan Lethem's Girl in Landscape had already attached itself to the work without my quite choosing it. Its haunting mood of intragalactic residue is sympathetic with the story I would wish my paintings to tell. (Brody, 2005)
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	P   I   E   R   O   G   I     2   0   0   0 177 north 9th street brooklyn, ny 11211 718.599.2144 noon to 6p friday through monday and by appointment pierogi 2000 is an innovative art gallery in williamsburg, brooklyn, new york