The New Naturalism
by Donald Kuspit


If these paintings by Mia Brownell and Derrick Guild are any clue, a "new naturalism" has appeared on the scene, convincing by reason of its ironical take on nature and by the exquisiteness of its rendering.  It’s a nature "After Eden," to refer to the title of Guild’s exhibition -- a nature that is no longer a paradise, that has fallen from the grace of God, and become a patinated "fiction" of itself, as Guild suggests.  Guild paints plants, deceptively beautiful, for they are tromp l’oeil illusions, painted on stained, aged, quasi-vellum canvas, suggesting they are a specimens of a dying nature, even memento mori of a nature that no longer exists -- a nature that is more artistic mirage than vital reality.  It’s a nature that gives Brownell "Stomach Acid Dreams," to refer to the title of her exhibition, for it stretches the dialectical imagination with its uncanniness:  a simple geometrical construction -- its abstract root, as it were -- that bears, like a cornucopian tree of life, lush fruit, as Still Life with Helix (2010) suggests.  What looks like sterile geometry is fertile with organic life.

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