You Are What You Eat

Eve Leibe Gallery presents ‘YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT’, a solo show of recent work by Nell Brookfield. These paintings reflect a new direction for Brookfield, who set out to explore a heightened awareness of touch experienced during the pandemic. The images are acutely sensual and reveal the flourishing imagination of an artist during this time, like an anemone opening in a dark underwater cave.

Brookfield’s paintings gleam with bright colour, dizzying patterns and alluring textures that seem alive, inviting the viewer to reach out and touch the canvas. Silky fabrics, rough tartan, feathers and fur, are mixed up with messy food, as well as twists of smoke and splashes of liquid, all merging to form chaos of sensation. Red hands grasp overripe fruit phones and handfuls of dripping spaghetti while steaming fast food seeps out of its packaging. Fastidiously coiffured women stare at prawn trees and valiantly embrace towers of macaroni and fried eggs on the verge of toppling. Snakes and wasps tangle into the images, creating a feeling of something buzzing or hovering on the edge of vision. A line of ants march across a woman’s face towards her eye and run through her hands, but she smiles on, as if oblivious to any threat.

Each work is richly detailed, with many thin layers of acrylic on canvas, built up over time. Brookfield explains that this process of repetitive mark-making is a way of connecting with the viewer, who is brought as close as possible to the feeling of the scene that is being developed. The intricacy of these patterns has the effect of drawing us in and slowing downtime, through the artist’s deep communication with texture. This labour-intensive method has a calming effect and is perhaps a way of dealing with the anxiety of living in an age where our attention has become a commodity.

All of the paintings included in this exhibition were created simultaneously in the studio. Brookfield made a conscious decision to work in this way, moving between them, adding to each in turn, in order to maintain a consistency of colour and style, so that they became a more complete body of work. In this way, they provide glimpses or sections of what could be imagined as larger compositions when viewed together. The narratives we might be tempted to form in response to these ‘stills ’from a larger scene are timeless, due to the wide range of references being used, from contemporary film and the Internet to satirical and grotesque classical works in the Renaissance and medieval tradition.

Brookfield emphasises the importance of artistic research and is constantly hunting and gathering for new fabrics, colours, textures and patterns. Inspiration is found through observation on the street, the tube, and at parties, as well as in magazines, literature, museums, exhibitions and archives, such as a recently discovered selection of the 1970s and 80s WeightWatchers advertisements, which became a focus of ridicule in this show.

The red hands featured in almost all of the paintings provide a unifying link, glowing luminously and seductively throughout the show, asking us to shift our gaze away from the hidden faces, as well as suggesting something forbidden or taboo. The viewer is taken into the realm of fairy tale and morality visions, at a time when we have become increasingly aware of touch as something dangerous. This ancient mingling of fear, disgust and desire, hints at shame, but ultimately the result remains as intangible and fleeting as the coils of smoke and hair that wind their way through the images.

At the same time, all of these works are joyful and absurdly humorous observations of the curious world we live in, morphed through memory and imagination into something rich and strange. Brookfield admits that the closest she gets to any kind of self-portrait is the pink hairy creature with eyes, who appears to shuffle sideways onto the scene, reminiscent of a character from anime. This mysterious being blinks out at the world, uncertain about where they belong, but absorbing everything at the moment; animate and wild. -Laura Barnicoat

Nell Brookfield (b.1994) currently lives and works in London. Brookfield investigates the absurdity of human life, by offering humorous and strange compositions taken from her everyday experiences. Inspired by people around London, films, and books, Nell paints from observation, memory and imagination with acrylic and oil paint on canvas. Bizarre crops show intimate sections of what could be larger works, asking the viewer to imagine what might lie just beyond the canvas. Each work is covered in detailed patterns and texture, accentuating the charged moments. Nell hopes the viewer will consider what it would be like to reach out and touch the fabrics she paints, or exist within the work.

In 2017 Nell received her BSc in Anthropology from UCL. In 2018 completed her postgraduate in Drawing from the Royal Drawing School in 2018, after which she was awarded a residency at the Rhode Island School Design. Between 2019-2020 Nell studied Drawing and Painting at the Pratt Institute.