Good Mother Gallery Los Angeles is pleased to present, Hard Body Soft, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Cosmas and Damian Brown. Hard Body Soft is a collection of works that consider the space that they represent as a container filled with meaning. The landscape has always been the representation of a single moment in space, an image of land and “empty” space.
The land, the light, the illusions of movement, they always retain a sense of nostalgia, memory, a romantic air of openness and freedom. Landscape painting has also been used as a way of occupying and inhabiting a place, but in these paintings the space is already inhabited, taken up by objects, some ancient, some contemporary, some completely invented. As the inhabitants of these spaces, the objects take on personalities. They replace bodies or heads and faces.
When objects are attributed personalities, they are imbued with power. These portraits aim to redirect the focus from a purely ethnocentric view to one that understands the importance of the object on the physical and metaphysical world stage. These objects are both full of meaning, and, in their decontextualization, devoid of it. They have direct reference but lack place; they have shapes that are somewhat familiars, but they lack true form.
