Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles
Let us now praise little painters. This here's from a letter Joe Brainard penned to poet John Ashbery talking about painter Al Held: “If there is such a thing as big painters and little painters he is certainly a big one. It has always occurred to me, tho, that little painters may be luckier than they know (Me me me).” For the big painters you step back; for a little painter like Brainard, you step forward, lean in, take off your glasses and look as close as you can. The big painters paint the big things—war, celebrity, whales maybe; little painters, like most good poets, pick up the hundred small, concrete details that actually make up life, if you're paying attention.
Brainard flurried for a dozen glorious years between 1965 and 1977, fueled by friendship with a terribly talented coterie, and heroic amounts of methamphetamines. During this truncated period he penned an iconic book-length poem I Remember (1970–75) and some 3,500 works of art across sundry mediums. A little painter with a big output and an undeniable wonder, Brainard's was a tender poetics of bric-a-bracking and people-pleasery, gentility and wit—wonderfully queer and just a little dirty, but always human in that soft, heart beating, absurdly silly way.
In his second show at Chris Sharp, there are twenty-five matchbooks recently discovered by the gallerist tucked into a bag beside a bed in Paris. All were made in 1975, the same year as a Fischbach Gallery show in New York where 1,500 of his miniatures were assembled at the peak of the flurry, and not coincidentally the chemical crescendo. Brainard would soon withdraw from exhibiting, then from making work, nearly fifteen quiet years before dying of AIDS in 1994.
Onto each of these tiny matchbook canvases Brainard painted, inked, and collaged, with a heartbreakingly witty delight. In one, a lone match becomes a signpost with a little sign (“Cookie Dept.”) collaged atop it; in another the paper strip becomes a broken stem for an embroidered purple pansy, its violet ground drawn and painted around thread. In some, the artist ignores or paints over the original text or images printed onto the matchbook to use it as a blank canvas, while at other times he folds the native printing into the final work, with slogans washed over in color but still legible: the cheerful can-do of 12 Ways to Succeed, brands like Hilton, a recurring Free Offer (see inside cover) lingering at the margins. Disposable, cheap, so much like words as to make a perfect canvas for poetry: each matchbook a refrain, the anaphora of I Remember made material.
Each contains its own discrete story. Two matches tuck into a quilted bed (a child's alphabet card, Q is for quilt), angled slightly askew into the matchbook. A table for lunch with a full glass of milk and a sandwich with a slice of Swiss and a lettucey green stamp. A couple of matches on either side hold a clothesline, the clothes fastidiously drawn on pink paper and exactingly cut, strung on a tattered thread, the tiniest pair of frilly panties you've ever seen. An open curtain announces II men and love, the serif type under a hazy white wash, and there they are, two paper matches, a little lonesome and a touch ragged, apart but together.
In Mona Lisa with Purple Frame, a tatty black-and-white reproduction of La Gioconda is stuck in, a smidge crooked as if lifted from another matchbook, and held by two burnt matches and crowned by a wetly hand-lettered museum. And you must bend nearer, and doing so you feel the close care, deep and delicate, those everyday intimacies and—rare in the annals of art—a gentle laugh.
My favorite is a pie-sweet blue rectangle missive: "Dear Mom & Dad, All is Well. Hope All is Well With You Too. Love, Joe," handwritten atop a matchbook whose printing carries a tiny photo of an older couple (Mom and Dad, maybe) and advertises a Tonel lube that "Smoothly Lubricates & Gently Stimulates." As all of these do.