Brian Fahlstrom

In Captivation/Allegro Vivace, Brian Fahlstrom decodes both nature and painting into an unruly system of attributions and translations. Flaunting his study of the masters, Fahlstrom appropriates the essence of Van Gogh, Derrain, Klimt, and Cezanne et.al. with an air of unnerving casualness. Composing a landscape by means of affiliation, clouds, trees, and mountains are distorted, not to suggest themselves, but to insinuate their art historical lineage. Through deciphering the tradition of painting, Fahlstrom resurrects artistic romanticism as a refreshingly new enchantment. Brian Fahlstrom’s landscapes are captivating in their painterly simplicity. Rendered in the golds and blues of Rennaissance painting, A Blossoming/Distant Impassionedness presents an abstracted breakdown of nature with pastoral undertones. Creating a sense of movement and shifting light through a combination of gestural brushwork and heavy stylised outlines, Fahlstrom portrays his landscape with a fairytale-like drama, derived from the romantic suggestions of Japanese woodcuts, Cubist fields, and contemporary graphic art. Through his paintings, Brian Fahlstrom resurrects a lost value of traditionalism. Using the act of painting as a form of intuitive expression, his landscapes encapsulate an immediacy of creative production. In Procession, impassioned brushstrokes emerge in concentrated patterns, and bright colours reverberate against consuming crevices of black; throughout is a raw current of motion, staid by an unfaltering sense of compositional stability. For Fahlstrom, landscape becomes a metaphor for the sublime recklessness of painting itself; a practice driven by the timeless pursuit of beauty. Brian Fahlstrom conceives painting as a dynamic which falls outside of lived experience; his canvases become fields of implausible invention and adventure. Conveying an intuitive notion of place, Fahlstrom’s paintings present a dream-like longing to realise an elsewhere existing only in fantasy. Using painting as a means to physically explore imagination, Fahlstrom’s abstracted landscapes unfold as tactile topographies. Heavy brushwork and layers of paint resolve as striated contours and organic matter, giving earthy tangibility to his escapist illusion.