Cecily Brown's paintings are awash with sexual imagery - but it's her powerful use of paint that is really dazzling, writes Aidan Dunne
One of the artists highlighted in the Saatchi Gallery's portentously titled The Triumph of Painting II is the English painter Cecily Brown. Charles Saatchi can claim to have been relatively quick off the mark in his appreciation of Brown's work, at least on this side of the Atlantic. The four paintings by Brown on view from his collection are dated from 1998 and 1999. By then she had already established a profile in New York, where she has been based since 1994, but it's fair to say that Britain was slower to come around to the idea of such a conspicuously painterly painter.
All that has changed in spectacular fashion, with Cecily Brown: Paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford - a substantial survey show of her paintings of the last few years - plus a frenetically erotic short animated film she made in 1995, Four Letter Heaven. The show attracted a degree of media attention that many more prominent art world celebrities might well envy.
Why? Part of the answer may be the conspicuous emphasis on sex in the paintings, and in the film. Often it is as if, for Brown, the experience of painting and the magical quality of paint itself equates to a state of prolonged sexual bliss. Her handling of paint inevitably recalls Willem de Kooning's comment: "Flesh was the reason oil paint was invented."
The air of orgiastic abandon of some of her early paintings, particularly - in which bodies melt, blend and merge in complex networks of voluptuous flesh, of legs and bottoms, mouths and fingers and phalluses and vaginas - is there even when the visual references are less explicit. This potentially contentious sexual content may have appealed to Saatchi's liking for art with a provocative edge.
There's something else about Brown that attracted a great deal of interest, though, and that is her background. The details have been widely aired recently. She was born in 1969, the youngest of three sisters. Her mother is Shena Mackay, the writer, who separated from her husband, Robin Brown, when Cecily was 12. Cecily went on to study art. When she was 21 and a fledgling graduate - in a plot twist that seems all too appropriate for a novelist's daughter - she learned her father was not Robin Brown but a celebrated art critic and writer, the late David Sylvester. She knew Sylvester as a friend of her mother's and as an affectionate, avuncular friend of hers.
Sylvester, who died in 2001, is best known as the authority on Francis Bacon. His book Interviews with Francis Bacon is an acknowledged classic and, more, Bacon's spirit and oeuvre came to permeate Sylvester's life in the most extraordinary way. He took Brown to see exhibitions of Bacon's work, and Bacon is a clear and acknowledged influence on her.
Two Figures in a Landscape, for example, directly recalls Bacon's Two Figures and Two Figures in the Grass. But more oddly, there have been distant echoes in Brown's experience of a couple of crucial events in Bacon's life.
One of those events was Bacon's dismissal of his long-term, exceptionally loyal dealer Erica Brausen in 1958 in favour of the prestigious Marlborough Fine Art, an understandable career decision that nevertheless left a sour taste. Another was the apparent suicide of his lover, George Dyer, on the eve of the opening of a major Bacon retrospective in Paris, a show that was one of the crowning achievements of his career and should have been a moment of triumph.
In New York, Brown's breakthrough came when, through Sylvester, she met the dealer Jeffrey Deitch, who signed her on for his gallery. Her two shows with Deitch attracted a decidedly mixed press, but the second earned an unprecedented level of attention - including the attention of one of the giants of the contemporary commercial art world, Larry Gagosian, an extraordinarily ambitious dealer who had boldly manoeuvred himself into a pivotal role in the art market.
It would be very hard indeed for any artist to say no to an offer from Gagosian, and Brown didn't. In career terms it was a no-brainer, but there was a certain loyalty issue involved. Then, around the time of her first New York outing for Gagosian, newspapers carried stories that someone linked romantically to her had attempted suicide.
So much for the back-story. The work itself demonstrates that there is much more to Brown than connections and hype. The first thing that strikes you is that she is a painter, through and through, something that may seem hardly worth mentioning but is quite contentious in the contemporary context. That is, unlike many other artists, she doesn't employ the grammar of abstract expressionism ironically: she's all there in her work; she means it. She is clearly not unaware of this issue herself, given that she went through a period of inner exile following her first exposure to the New York art world, forsaking painting for experimentation in other media.
The strange thing here is that one of the fruits of her experimental phase, Four Letter Heaven, brought her back to painting with an enhanced sense of purpose and identity. Indeed the film, which is a brilliant piece of work, is unmistakably painterly - a cascade of explicit sexual imagery that is enraptured as much by the malleable, melting quality of its constituent watercolour drawings as by its ostensible subject matter.
It is fascinating that the catalogue for her Oxford show opens with a long series of full-page-bleed illustrations taken from a variety of her source material, with just one reproduction of one of her most obviously derivative images. Then there is a phalanx of critical texts, the first sentence of which reads: "While it is the common view that painting has lost its pre-eminence as a medium, it has not lost its power to engage and excite."
They are thoroughly adequate and informative texts, but this underwhelming opening rather sets the tone. It's a bit like a conclave of cardinals discussing the virtues of atheism. In the theology of contemporary art theory, Brown's work is something of a heretical, even pagan presence - or as curator Suzanne Cotter terms it, "a rowdy intrusion" that, in its protean restlessness, "can elude language and history".
In the catalogue, only after they've been suitably tamed and corralled by this process of contextualisation do we get to reproductions of the paintings themselves. Not only are the reproductions framed small on the page, but the format might as well have been designed to diminish them, which is a pity because in the flesh (so to speak) they have tremendous verve and subtlety.
One is tempted to say that many of the paintings are so insistently about sex that they are probably not about sex at all - but then they obviously are, to some extent, about sex. But it is true as well that in them sex is a metaphor, a visualisation of a more generalised state of desire rather than an end in itself. Yet for this viewer at any rate, Brown's paintings are best when she manages to perpetuate an uncertainty about what it is we are looking at, when meaning is implied but indefinitely postponed, when our eyes keep moving and the passages of wonderfully fluid paint don't coalesce into fixed and - it has to be said - sometimes lax, awkward images.
Several of her most recent works are also her most representationally indeterminate, packed though they are with myriad representational references. Quotations from her in the catalogue convey something of this elusive quality.
"I want to catch something in the act of becoming something else . . . something hard to name. Maybe that is why . . . don't want things completely described."
In his book, Working Space, painter Frank Stella brilliantly conveys how a painter is always trying to catch something perpetually just out of sight. Brown strikingly echoes him in describing what she is doing: "You grope to understand what might be an image, it remains out of reach. . . "
In a sense it has to remain out of reach. As Stella puts it: "This ephemeral quality of painting reminds us that what is not there, what we cannot quite find, is what great painting always promises."
Cecily Brown: Paintings is at the Modern Art Oxford, Pembroke Street, Oxford, until Aug 28. Contact 0044-1865722733. The Triumph of Painting II is at the Saatchi Gallery, London. Contact 0044-2079288195