Nature morte cosmique 1988

Eugene Brands made this ‘Cosmic Still Life’ with paint. The marks are bold and simplified; burnt orange and bone white against an almost black table, lit by the barest pinpricks of starlight. I imagine Brands starting with a dark ground, thinking about outer space and domestic space at once. Maybe he was trying to bring the vastness of the cosmos into the simple arrangement of objects on a table. I wonder if the red pot is a planet, or if he wanted to bring that sense of cosmic wonder down to earth, into the everyday. The forms are reduced to their essence, capturing the bare minimum of what’s needed to suggest a bowl, a table. It reminds me of other painters like Marsden Hartley or Milton Avery, who were also interested in simplification and the emotional resonance of color. Artists are in a continuous dialogue across time, sparking one another’s imagination! Instead of fixed meanings, painting embraces ambiguity and the potential for endless interpretations.