Brenden Clenaghen
When I was young, my friends and I would sometimes describe great films as “cosmic,” partly in self-parody of our enthusiasms. But some abstract art is cosmic in a more literal way. The patterns in Brenden Clenaghen’s seven paintings at Zolla/Lieberman and in Howard Hersh’s ten at Gwenda Jay/Addington seem to stretch beyond the pictures’ borders, as if these works were mere fragments of an imagined universe.
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One is tempted to apply the word “oceanic” to such art. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud attributes oceanic feelings to a desire to return to the womb–but there’s nothing quite that weighty at work here. For one thing, Clenaghen’s paintings can be humorous. Candy colors in The Monitors modify the vastness evoked by its vertical bands of dots, and the circles filled with red lines are, well, a bit goofy: the artist doesn’t seem to be taking himself too seriously.
