Cosmas & Damian Brown

Galería Hilario Galguera presents Oil by artist Cosmas & Damian Brow.

Oil, hidden and sheltered by the earth, requires an alignment of coincidences for its creation: specific subterranean pressures, decomposing organic matter and the patience of millions of years. This material, appearing grotesque, viscous, and irrelevant, became the lifeblood of the industrial development that led to the contemporary world as we know it, machines and engines becoming the backbone of society. The black gold is not only a hidden source of energy; it is a substance loaded with philosophical meanings. In its extraction, a distillate is generated that transforms crude matter into pure liquid, fulfilling in a way the dream of the ancient alchemical rites of transformation of matter, producing a substance that represents a fundamental yet ambiguous wealth.

The exhibition, composed of oil paintings of oil cans and containers, began with a line drawing, which evolved into an exploration to understand machines and oil in a symbolic way. Brown presents vessels and containers portrayed individually, set against a stark, abstract landscape, leading the eye directly to the object.

Each portrait is inspired by advertising designs that evolved over the years, but contrast with the glorification of mass consumer culture explored in the art pop movement in the 1960s by Andy Warhol through a series of silkscreen portraits of Campbell’s soup cans. Brown seeks to isolate each container and highlight its individual character, replacing the impersonal and rigid aesthetic of the commercial product with the warmth and uniqueness of the handmade. The textures of the oil paint, as well as its mixture with linseed oil, resonate with the artist’s conceptual explorations, while the elements that make up his collages provoke reflections of the fragmented realities and contradictions represented by oil.

The cans and containers, turned into symbols of the industrial and the ephemeral, stand as symbols of absence, of what disappears in the process of transformation from the physical to the digital world, of the lack of knowledge regarding the impacts that new technologies can generate, including those that seek to delay the impact of oil on the environment. And at the same time, this absence is shown as a monument to emptiness, portrayed by the vacant spaces that give value to the containers, cans and vessels that make up the exhibition. Becoming, in turn, modern and contemporary relics as each object, and its design, becomes obsolete.

–Icka Gallego