Mark Dicey

Exhibition text by Author + Curator, Lisa Christensen

Expertly curated and thoughtfully arranged, Dicey + Brown presents two distinct bodies of visually melodious work. As a pairing, Brown’s small panels and Dicey’s lyrical abstractions create a colour chorus, balanced and vivid, yet controlled, a symphony of colour theory. How fine to walk into a space where colour is used with such care and attention. The pairing of Dicey’s recent works, titled only by date and his careful numbering system, together with The New Jersey Series works by Brown from a decade and more ago, is an eloquent choice. Here, by way of pure, classic abstraction, and through the language of shape, form, and space, pared down to a basic visual alphabet, we find ourselves enveloped and thoroughly enriched by harmonious, thoughtful, sensitive array of space, form, and colour.

Brown’s shapes are played like pieces in a chess game, exceedingly carefully and with intention. They speak of places, memories, observations, things from the Big City. Dicey’s abstracts are small vignettes, each a unique environment unto itself. A place, a feeling, a day. Skilled at abstracting from things they know well, each begins with direct observation, then takes us down a different path. As the abstraction unfolds, and because of the attention to balance, form, and palette, the concrete nature of both bodies of work is abandoned, leaving us pondering fluctuating depth, the rhythm of line, and the harmonious colour conversation.

Dicey’s work is new, recent continuations of his lifelong fascination with – and mastery of – formal abstraction. A serial sketcher, he is rarely without his small, thickly packed sketchbooks; page after page of speculative observations rendered in swirls, shapes, boldly emblematic forms, they are small-scale environments. These environments inform his larger works, wherein shape and theoretical shape become exuberant, thoughtful works on larger sheets of paper which then might become larger canvases. Paired with Browns’ small-scale panels, the effect is delicious.

These two bodies of work meet in the middle with overlapping memory snippets. There are hints of an alphabet, vessels, perhaps the shape of a cut out hairpeice for a paper doll, or the memory of a toy or play structure – and painted nods to meaningful things from one’s past, or at least one’s memories of them, that in turn become forms that belie an exact equivalent, somehow referring to many things at once. Such shapes, and the colours that are used to depict them, call up memories that will be unique to each viewer – childhood things, lost possessions, important places, and both shared and private experiences. Brown’s shapes are like cryptographs, sometimes drawn from his own idiosyncratic interests and experiences, sometimes being more universal. Bordered by jam-stain-finger-marks or slightly overlapped painted edges that build up upon themselves and hang on the corners of his panels like crusts of rust or lichen, Brown’s work hints at things we know, while Dicey’s intuitive and passionate ability to take things apart visually and let them play out of his brush is contained only by the borders of his page or canvas edge. Abbreviated content, attention to the essential, and a sense of the lyrical permeate these works. Sewn together through each painter’s colour intellect, Dicey + Brown is a visual feast.