PRESS RELEASE
BRETT CHARLES SEILER - scenes from an apartment
Oct 19 – Nov 19, 2022
In his latest solo exhibition, ‘scenes from an apartment’, Cape Town based artist, Brett Charles Seiler invites us into his life, revealing his desires and vulnerabilities with care, honesty and wit.
Through the creation of a freestanding staged room installed within Everard Read’s CIRCA gallery space, Seiler connects everyone who sets foot into it and to the lived experience of the scenes and portraits which are hung on the walls. By entering this almost-theatrical set, we are not just witnesses but participants in the ongoing narratives Seiler shares. Here, with black-painted walls, scuffed parquet flooring and hipster house plants, the audience is welcomed into Seiler’s personal narratives, astute observations and tender ruminations.
However momentarily we inhabit his suspended space, Seiler asks us to accept the truth that his sensitive depictions are as substantial as we are. The midnight after-parties, the close embraces, the single load-shedding candle, the rickety furniture – these images inhabit the space. The figures manage to be very real despite their sketched lines – a chin on a hand, a ruffled hat, a distinctive moue. We feel sure we almost recognise them, though the relationships between them remain tenuous. Is he really just a room-mate?
By separating stage and gallery – revealing behind-the-scenes realities of struts and sandbags – Seiler not only acknowledges the temporal nature of his constructed world but also hints at the facade and fleetingness depicted in his paintings. The ordinary domestic objects he paints are place-holders for moments, urgent or languorous, that have happened or are about to occur; the unsteady perspective of the larger paintings destabilise our sense of time as well as place. The whited-out figures, just-visible in the background, haunt the painted present, as these images will haunt us with their sense of tenderness, alienation, intimacy and unrequited possibility.
For more information, please contact Grace O’Malley grace@everard.co.za
