Christopher Le Brun: Swan Ritual

Drawing its title from A.R. Ammons’ eponymous poem, Swan Ritual represents a distillation of Le Brun’s artistic strategies over the past two decades. This new body of work, comprised of 15 oil paintings and 2 works on paper, reveals his longstanding aim of bringing together color, gesture, space and form to create a fresh visual world both compelling and poetic. These exhilarating new paintings represent the further development of a visual language commenced with the artist’s resumption of abstract painting in the early 2010s.

In The Swan Ritual, Ammons considers how poetry is an invitation for both the writer and the reader to engage in complications that are resolved somewhere within the meaning and cadence of the text. The poet explains, “Something has to be invented before you can work your way out of it, and that’s what happens at the very center of a poem.” This sentiment resounds throughout Le Brun’s work, in which the act of painting becomes a series of questionings, hints, and intuitions in search of solutions to the unique complications posed by each canvas within the studio.