Little Death Laid Bare and Maiden Fair 2019

Jana Brike created this painting called, Little Death Laid Bare and Maiden Fair, sometime in the 21st century. The hyperreal style is so slick it's almost like a digital rendering. A lot of painters today try to make their paintings look not-painted, but I actually think it's cool. The subject is, well, intense! Death and sex! You could get lost in a philosophical reverie about the transience of life, but I'm mostly stuck on the paint itself. The bones and blossoms are painted in a tight, focused way, but there's something unresolved about that horizon line. It's almost like Brike is deliberately refusing to resolve the image into a single idea. The painting as a whole is like a poem with a missing line. It's this openness to different readings that makes the work compelling. I'm reminded of Odd Nerdrum, who also deals with this idea of tension between old-world painting and contemporary experience.