November 15, 2018 to January 13, 2019
291 Grand Street, between Eldridge and Allen streets
New York City, gavinbrown.biz

A Brian Belott show is an occasion that can resemble the release of a long-awaited book from a reclusive scholar, and his current exhibition at Gavin Brown’s enterprise is no exception. At once a mini mid-career survey spanning 20 years of production and a showcase of things he just cooked up, there are lessons here for neophytes and refreshers for devoted followers. While the solo shows can feel far apart, Belott is an important driver in the New York art scene.  Best known for his more or less constant flow of performance art pieces (both his own projects and as participant in the work of other artists) and as a pied piper for the neo-beat wing of the downtown art scene.  It seems fitting that Belott looks to highlight the variety of his very various practice in his current show, but Belott shines most in the more recent work, as he pushes his practice into strange new territories.

“Puuuuuuuuffs,” a group of recent, large-scale collaged paintings (two are in the 85 by 75-inch range, big for Belott), are extremely inventive materially and totally odd. The title comes from the oversized cotton balls Belott slathers in paint and uses to frame the paintings, like non-structural stretchers. The works are formally tight but never fussy. They feel like they skidded into existence: paint, paper, string, glue all landing inches away from disaster, as if he slammed on the brakes in the nick of time, or is playing a jazz solo just on the verge of failure. The biggest pieces in the series have actual box fans inserted into their surfaces. Wobbly, spray painted and lacking grills, these blow recycled air of questionable freshness on the viewer and serve as formal devices referring to geometric abstraction and heaps of post-summer garbage. You can peek through the spinning blades and spot the bricks, pipes and windows behind the partition walls of the gallery. Despite the simplicity of the devices themselves, the works are oddly disorienting, yet the confident scale and the subtle color are declarative and welcoming.

Belott embodies the model of artist as archivist and hoarder, finding a use for everything. Looking at the show it is easy to sense the mountains of material he must have pawed through in order to arrive at just the right assortment of detritus. Can Opener Keyboard is made of up vintage electric can openers attached to a board that’s invitingly set up at table height, awaiting a fool who has learned to play such a faux-fancy instrument. The idea of incorporating and elevating such a diminished object as electric can openers to art status startles. Never one for subtlety, Belott underlines the abjectness by leaving dashes of petrified tomato sauce on the yellowing retro appliances, leaving one wondering whether to laugh or cry.

The show reaches its crescendo in a darkened side gallery containing three large, mysteriously lit, commercial stand-up freezers with glass doors.  Inside, clamped to stainless steel poles, stand multi colored rectangular hunks of ice containing a kaleidoscopic assortment of flotsam and/or metaphysical talismans. A plastic hand, nesting measuring cups, an abacus, old doorknobs, puzzle pieces and bits of yarn are folded into a frosty enigma. Belott lists his materials lovingly on the gallery checklist. These small portrait-sized surrealistically formal concoctions evoke Arthur Dove and Ed Kienholz in equal measure. To look on the Belott’s frozen works is to sense both the absurdity and depth of his project.  He succeeds in implicating himself, the audience and his culture through his screwball ode to waste, novelty and a life spent sifting trash in the pursuit of art.

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May 10 through June 20, 2015
57 Stanton St. (at Eldridge Street)
New York

247365, which recently moved from its location in Brooklyn’s Donut District arts outpost to a new space on Stanton Street in Manhattan, is currently showing recent work by Brian Belott, in an exhibition called “Dr. Kid President Jr.” Dozens of paintings are spread across two walls, and a book has been published by the gallery to coincide with the show, along with a zine published by the artist. The paintings, the book, and the zine all expand on Belott’s interest in children’s art, which has previously been evident in his work, though perhaps not so explicitly as here.

The images — made with vivid, matte Flashe paint on canvas — are all reproduced from art by children from around the world, found in books collected by Belott. The titles, such as The Bears, Marcelo Abramovsky, Age 8, Argentina (2014) and Clown 1960’s Art Education (2014) give some indication of that derivation. So, too, with the pseudo-naïve handling of line and form. The figures are haphazardly lumpy, protean, archetypal — exactly the kind of free and uninformed qualities that have drawn Belott, the Surrealists, Expressionists, Cubists, and others to images like these since at least the 19th century. For many, the uninfluenced work of children and outsiders was considered a basis for new artforms free of the strictures of art history and academic images. These connections and interests aren’t new, of course, but being reminded of them can be affecting, even as written through the hands of a skillful adult.

When asked about Belott’s connection to this material, 247365 co-founder MacGregor Harp explained that the artist considers his work more in the vein of Art Brut. That self-identification may be in contradiction with Belott’s education at the School of Visual Arts, though the claim’s credibility is also essentially ancillary to the work itself.

Some of the images appear antiquated, such as two different and nearly identical renderings of men with swords, both titled A Duel, Gustavo da Silva, Age 9, Argentina (2015). Although there are cars in the background, the two armed protagonists face each other at the center foreground and they appear as if engaged in some pre-modern rite, brandishing weapons at one another while two groups of men in top hats are arrayed on each side. The landscape is described almost exclusively with bands of muted greens and blues, and trees line the horizon in a neat row.

One can see amazing leaps in dexterity and technical proficiency between children only a few years apart in age. The interior scene depicted in Mother and Son, Mumtaz Sultan Ali, Age 12, India (2014) probably has as much innate sophistication as a lot of contemporary deskilled painting. And Radiation, Keith School, Age 16, Rockford, IL. (2015) could be completely at home in a survey of Fauvist painting.

The gallery-published book, smartly titled Brian Belott: Early Works, is comprised of a selection of Belott’s own childhood drawings. Star Wars characters, ninjas, pirates, skeletons and other characters stand, tumble and fly across the pages, rendered in marker and pen, occasionally with juvenile text. One drawing is inscribed with the sweetly adolescent “LOVƎ.” In another, there’s the surprising and sophisticated list:

COBALT
CHLORIDE
METHYL-
SALICYL

Belott’s zine, meanwhile, is filled with arrays of drawings by children, each page organized into a block of similar images: scribbles, indecipherable cruciform symbols, heads sprouting arms and legs, blocky windows and hashmarks. Neither book offers any commentary, and instead stand simply as compilations of marks, attempts to understand the world and to understand these elemental depictions of it. Harp explained the catalogues as Belott trying to find unadulterated markmaking.

In addition to calling attention to this well of source material, Belott is also using the show to encourage more children to make art. Interestingly, earnestly, he has pledged his half of the proceeds of any sales to Art Start, an arts program for children who “live in city shelters, on the streets, are involved in court cases, or surviving with parents in crisis.”

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