Just over a year after the James Cope Gallery opened its new location around the corner from the Warehouse Dallas Art Foundation and across the Tollway from the Galleria Dallas, a new show there features three large-scale paintings by the young London painter Lewis Brander, accompanied by a number of smaller ones.
Brander’s cloudlike paintings give a sense of an up-close encounter with the atmosphere, creating thrilling ambiguity about surface and depth, light and shadow, movement and stillness, and different states of matter (does a cloud feel more like solid, liquid or gas?) Hints of solid ground and foliage at the margins of the canvases suggest, but do not insist upon, a viewer’s orientation and frame of reference.
The works partake of what art historian Robert Rosenblum dubbed the “abstract sublime” of the northern Romantic tradition: a sense of awe and wonder, even in the face of nature. Just as Rosenblum saw 20th-century abstract painters such as Mark Rothko as heirs to the 19th-century landscapes of Turner and Friedrich, art historian Rye Dag Holmboe, in an accompanying text, places Brander’s abstractions in the tradition of his fellow Londoner, the Romantic landscape painter John Constable.
To round out the presentation, additional work by Brander is being shown this month by his London Gallery, Vardaxogulu, at the Dallas Invitational art fair (another Cope production).
“Lewis Brander: Blue Shift” continues through May 16 at James Cope Gallery, 4885 Alpha Road, Suite 120, Farmers Branch. Free. Open Wednesday through Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m. Appointments advised. jamescope.biz.