Online Exclusive, Reviews

Andrew Brischler

Beyond the Grid: Cinematic Transitions

Words PLUS MAGAZINE

Andrew Brischler’s recent shift in artistic practice signals a bold and introspective departure, transforming his once orderly geometries into deeply personal explorations of the human form. Rooted in cinematic imagery and shaped by his own experiences, Brischler’s work now traverses the delicate balance between abstraction and representation, pushing the boundaries of portraiture. His deep engagement with queer-coded cultural references and iconic female figures from film imbues his art with emotional weight and complexity. This evolution reflects both a formal and thematic expansion, inviting viewers to reconsider how identity and image intersect within his vivid, meticulously crafted world.

PLUS MAGAZINE: Your transition from orderly geometries and typographic motifs to the human form marks a significant shift in your artistic practice. What prompted this evolution, and how do you see it intersecting with your previous body of work?

ANDREW BRISCHLER: This evolution was a long time coming. I felt like I had been skirting the issue for years, purposefully omitting the use of actual cinematic imagery from my practice because of some flimsy rules I’d imposed upon myself. I told myself that I wasn’t a representational artist; that so many peers had used the imagery I was interested in; and that The Pictures Generation had already done all this. Those guard rails kept me firmly planted in my lane for years.

When I was getting my MFA at the School of Visual Arts beginning in 2010, there was a real trend to toward “provisional painting,” a term coined by Raphael Rubinstein in his 2009 Art in America essay of the same name. As an impressionable young grad student unsure of what—if anything—I was trying to say, I ran with the idea, making scruffy little paintings on raw canvas covered in flecks of studio dust, daubs of oil paint, and schoolboy doodles of rudimentary typography. At the time, the only way I knew how to infuse queer oriented pop cultural content into these paintings was through their titles. I used song lyrics, movie titles, and famous quotes— anything to signal to the viewer what I was actually interested in.

After graduation, I returned to focus on drawing, the practice I had been most interested in during my undergraduate days. Working outside the confines of a structured academic environment for the first time, I began appropriating pieces of typography and graphic design elements from my favorite films, books, and queer ephemera without overthinking how they all related to each other. The drawings were simply just a way to document my life through the culture I consumed.

Fast forward to May 2020. Freshly out of a long term relationship and still in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown, I had nothing to do except go to the studio and watch movies every night. Those months, while amorphous and terrifying, were cocoon like in their insularity and ultimately led to a lot of healing. I would snap photos with my iPhone while watching important scenes, post them to instagram, and through that, I developed meaningful dialogues with friends I couldn’t see in the flesh. Eventually—and with a lot of self consciousness—I began manipulating the images in Photoshop until they felt related to the rest of my work—abstracted, geometric and codified in some way. I think of the Self Portraits as inextricably linked to the rest of my work. The typographic drawings are still ongoing and will still be shown when the time is right. In a lot of ways, it’s all the same project — different branches from the same tree.

P: Your Self Portraits pay homage to iconic female leads in contemporary cinema, such as Sigourney Weaver in Alien and Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface. Could you elaborate on the significance of these particular characters in your artistic exploration?

AB: I began watching movies in earnest when I was a very anxious, very confused, very depressed 11 year old on Long Island. Every day was filled with the same barrage of insults by boys in middle school for being feminine, and it was becoming increasingly clear to me I had a big old problem on my hands—I was gay.

Friday nights, though, acted as a glimmer of brightness in what was otherwise a very dark time. While my mother was picking up a pizza for that night’s dinner, I would head to Blockbuster Video in the same strip mall and pore over the DVD lined shelves—a beautiful ritual lost to our digital streaming world. I found myself consistently drawn to horror movies and thrillers, eventually making my way through the filmographies of directors like Alfred Hitchcock, John Carpenter, Ridley Scott, and Wes Craven. Psycho. Halloween. Alien. A Nightmare on Elm Street. Scream. I was hooked.

I didn’t understand it consciously at the time, but these films became the receptacles for all the dread I felt in the outside world. I was able to focus my feelings and exorcise them through the harrowing scenarios I was watching play out on the screen in my parent’s basement. The heroines—Marion Crane, Laurie Strode, Ellen Ripley, Nancy Thompson, Sidney Prescott—became avatars for my own suburban terror. It was only later, after dating so many boys who also loved horror movies for the same personal and queer reasons, that I realized I was part of a whole lineage of gay teens who also saw themselves in these strong women.

P: The graphic sensibility of your Self Portraits, with halftone dots and the appearance of printed matter or silkscreen printmaking, adds a unique dimension to the images. Can you discuss the process behind achieving this aesthetic, especially considering the painstaking hand labor involved?

AB: Over the past several years, long before I started actually working on the Self Portraits, I began amassing a digital library of movie stills. Some shots I snap on my iPhone off my living room TV, while others I download via nerdy forums from the bowels of the internet; once I started hunting online, I discovered a huge community of fans who compile and upload thousands of screen shots for a given film.

Once I’ve decided I want to turn a specific image into a drawing, the Photoshop editing begins. I spend a few days figuring out the correct cropping; blurring areas and sharpening others; enhancing planes of light and deepening pockets of shadows. Then, I turn the edited photo into a bitmap file, which changes it into a halftone pattern — a complex terrain of dots, splotches, and squiggles that our brains turn back into an understandable image.

Then, I prepare a sheet of Coventry Rag, a paper typically favored by printmakers for its durability and unique tooth. I cover the entire surface in gouache—a type of acrylic paint I use for its intense vibrancy that, when dried, is matte and velvety. Then I project the bitmap file on the surface, trace out the pattern, and spend the next several weeks methodically filling it all in with colored pencil.

That duration of the labor and its almost punitive feeling of repetition is precisely part of the point; those long days of drawing are a kind of liminal space when I listen to podcasts, audiobooks, or ambient music that let new drawing ideas float into the peripheral parts of my brain.

P: In your statement, you mention rewatching certain films repeatedly as a means of getting closer to the characters. How does this process of extreme identification with a character influence your artistic interpretation and portrayal of them in your work?

AB: I can’t imagine making a drawing of a character I don’t feel some sort of connection to; I either have to identify with them personally, with their situation, or feel a kind of ineffable sense of attraction to them. Part of what made me so apprehensive about developing this body of work is its earnestness, which can be a kind of noose around the neck of an artwork. I’m not coming from a place of antagonism or overt cultural critique (though that may come as the series evolves), but rather more of a place of reverence and imagination. I’ve thought a lot about Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills series from the 1970’s while making this work. In those photographs, Sherman inhabits various cinematic archetypes to explore the slipperiness of her own identity. I think I’m after the same thing with the Self Portraits.

Since these characters are often stand-ins for me at different stages in my life, the cropping, composition, and color choices are always deliberate and in service of achieving a specific mood. I’m interested in capturing what photographer Henry Cartier-Bresson deemed “the decisive moment,” that perfect moment where all the elements of a composition come together. For Cartier-Bresson, that was captured in a millisecond with a camera shutter, but in my process that moment is more careful curated — I’m interested in finding that galvanizing click between myself and the character on screen, a psychic connection merging cinema with reality, conjured up storylines colliding with my autobiography.

P: The self-portraits seem to exude both intimacy with the subject and the surface on which they are rendered. Could you delve into how this intimacy informs your connection to both the characters you depict and the artistic process itself?

AB: I recently ran into one of my professors from graduate school, the painter Suzanne McClelland, who I’ve always admired for her idiosyncratic, multifarious take on the medium. She had an observation about the Self Portraits that took me by surprise in its sensitivity. She said, “your drawings do the opposite of what movies do. They slow things down to a halt.” And that’s exactly the kind of experience I’m interested in — an intimacy achieved with a kind of slow devotion in the making and ultimately, for the viewer, in the looking.

I remember seeing Titanic with my dad as a kid in the winter of 1998 and being completely spellbound. I spent the following months making dozens of drawings of that ship in various stages of sinking, each drawing more intricate than the last. I rendered splintered floorboards, the lowering of lifeboats, and ant-sized passengers with a No. 2 pencil on printer paper. In retrospect, those days of drawing were my attempts to go inside the movie; I was futilely chasing a sense of intimacy with that giant blockbuster.

In many ways, I’m still that 10 year old searching for an intimate artistic experience. The long days I spend drawing amoebic shapes that slowly reveal a character’s face are how I feel a sense of closeness to not only to who I’m depicting, but also to myself, grounded in my adult self but also reaching back in time to grab hands with the 10 year old I once was.

I hope that the viewer finds some of that slowly evolving connection, too. First, they recognize the character. Then perhaps they have a flickering memory of when they first saw the movie. Then, the connection deepens when they get up close to the drawing, seeing the raking light catch the frenzied field of colored pencil marks covering the surface.

P: Finally, what do you hope your oeuvres contribute to the ongoing dialogue surrounding representation, identity, and the intersection of art and popular culture?

AB: I like to think of my work as a living organism — an ever evolving catalogue documenting the interior, sensitive world of one gay man. My thoughts, my fears, my obsessions, my desires, my neuroses, my life. Just me. I’m not interested in making work that tries to take a political position or tries to proclaim in broad, defiant gestures what queerness means in the twenty-first century.

I also try hard to not think about where my work is situated in the broader context of queer artists while I’m making it; that kind of heady thinking would grind the work to a halt and make it appear self conscious, or worse, self important. But I think that lack of agenda actually does make the work political in a way. It’s taken a lot hard work over the last decade of making work to get to a place where I truly listen to my gut and trust my emotional and artistic self; the second guessing of every thought we have or move we make is inherent to the queer experience, and so too is transcending it.

It’s so vitally important for the experiences of queer people — beautiful and messy — to be expressed out loud all over the planet, especially with the hot breath of venomous groups breathing down our necks. That’s all I’m interested in offering — living my life authentically and beautifully by making beautiful things. And today, that’s still a radical act. On we go.