The Brooklyn Rail

Can void be intricate? Does that intricacy convey magnitude, or quiet, or is it a depiction of time? Joseph Brock’s paintings in his exhibition Every Asterism at Foreign & Domestic clear out space to explore soft architectures, fragile colors, and the light of afterimages. They are cropped in to harness magnitudes beyond their limit—preserving enough to envelop the viewer in a faded glow. Brock has developed a language capable of compressing regions within small windows, attuning small, delimited moments to engage with their higher choreographies. Its quiddity is this compression, the harmonics discovered between limit and void shaped by a similar sound, maintained by a closed aperture that gestures towards infinite expanse while keeping its brevity.

In some ways, Every Asterism feels like William Pope.L’s Hole Theory as a poetics in practice, the “voodoo of nothingness” that Pope.L describes now utilized by Brock as a method to address the edge. The hole of the center inverses its own presence. It fluctuates between cut-out, image, and deep space, forcing drama to the margins. Kemble’s Cascade (S.1) (2024) crowds the details of the painting to the edge, where the marginalia becomes rhythm, Christmas beans or apparitions of the eye. Maybe they aren’t the depiction of anything, but instead are a placeholder for impossibility—represented by the dance of the opposing colors of red and green that are difficult to see together at once. By focusing our attention to the periphery, and in this case a chromatic impossibility, we feel the absence of the center. It becomes a meditation on what isn’t there and what cannot be tethered, a beauty without gravity. A black hole, a hole itself, the trace around the edge reveals the generosity of what the artist allows to be occluded. It forms a halo of meaning that stays out beyond the fullest stretch of peripheral vision.

Void here is content. It is sculptural but also breath. It maintains itself through the subtle layering of color. It is airy, but it is also weighted. It evokes visions, the images that form on the back of an eye from staring at the sun too long, but also the visions waiting to be found within the ordinary. In Brock’s painting Kearsten (S.1) (2023), he lightly paints the pattern of a paper towel roll, the kind that can be found at the corner store. He studies its exquisite pattern, always present but never seen, within arm’s reach to clean and restore. Brock slowly fills it in, loads it with sigil or a dance step or a growing cellular divide, a rich arithmetic of unrevealed meaning. It's a form of continuance of the ordinary into something more transcendent contained in layers within the swiped surface. Is it meager? Or is it generous to see a constellation in the paper towel roll—to notice it? I think of how in the seventies, a woman saw Christ’s face in a tortilla or later the face of Mother Mary in a window in Perth Amboy. Whether it is misplaced belief or enchantment, it is a ritual of the miraculous, or the way DeLillo describes coincidence. A coincidence is a way of acknowledging something we don’t have a name for. It reveals a “hidden principle.” By paying such close attention to the overlooked, Brock invites a meditation of these hidden principles that don’t resolve their standing.

The color is faded versions of once intense chroma. You used to be neon! You used to be dazzling! Now you’re kind of holding onto incandescence, a fantastic murmur. Maybe it’s tragic, maybe it’s the rescue of something, but it relies on undoing and thinning—the stray marks still visible underneath silver and broad sweeps of warm white. Scuffed into a clear gesso surface, soft marks are disagreed with, challenged, blurred, which makes them desire to be drawing as much as painting. It's exciting and sad but profuse after everything has been cleared. It implies the ability to be moved or erased. Funfetti cake in a snow drift, arriving at a slow speed, cloud shadows over deep valleys.

Brock thinks of his paintings in terms of generations. A painting gives lineage to another and another, a family tree of swipes and marks that gives it the ability to continue. Painting here generates more knowledge learned through gesture. Whavbe (S.1) (2024) is a key or a schematic or a brief architecture or a field or a mathematics of possible interpretation. Expression one, expression two, expression three3, and so on. Fravbe (S.1) (2023–24) depicts a type of allele branching that originates more systems. But each painting also continues a lineage of debt to other artists. Teenage Troubles (S.1) (2024) could be a collaboration with John Baldessari, Seth Price, or the Memphis Group in the way that Brock uses graphic color to carve out rings into the surface of the canvas, using images to return painting into an object. Each of Brock’s surfaces offers what is inherited and also a unique attempt, forming a serial grouping of painterly chiasmus. The works echo each other, find each other across the space of the gallery. Kamehameha (S.1) (2024) records a mise-en-abyme, a small annotation of Kearsten (S.1) within its umber. Something has to stay the same. The standardization of scale allows us to see around the eclipse, perceive the hole that Brock has generated, the beauty of absence that shares in resonance that is tuned to the same pitch.

Brock’s work keeps company with a group of young painters that are saying less with more, who are scraping down paint, erasing and reestablishing marks, and attending to negative space as a subject. It is a group that extends the important work of Frank Bowling, Sam Gilliam, Howardena Pindell, and Robert Ryman among others. Mira Schor’s writings in Wet are also relevant here—the suspicion of figure-ground and the patriarchal primacy of the unique mark has limited our language for texture, accrual, spread, and the field. What Brock brings to this is the important suspicion, the dialectic of doubt and maybe exhaustion or deeper melancholy. He is taking deep space and arranging hard edges within it, continuing Thomas Nozkowski in a way that seems to be more about meditation or a synthesis with the momentum of Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun. It is the geometric hard line that makes each universe a sky window. Every Asterism is a collection of first seasons that each imply a future that works through heartbreak and all the moments hopefully contained by staring into the silhouette of warmer light. It carries or moves the site of painting to some other beyond and allows us to look up and through.