The Brooklyn Rail

Touching on themes of beauty and vanity, pleasure and mortality, The Stationary Traveler is a selective survey of twenty-two paintings and two sculptures of modest scale by Farrell Brickhouse, now in the fifth decade of his career. Dating from 1997–2025, these works present moving testimony to his career-long pursuit of authenticity of expression, relatively small objects that jump scale in their absorptive power. As our attention is seized by odd situations and figures—acrobats, corpses, fallen kings—we lose ourselves completely in the time they take to fully decipher. His subjects rarely stand alone, but lean against one another in telling repetitions: seagoers afloat; disembodied legs; struggling pairs; offerings of bouquets or giant fish.

Brickhouse lays his oils on thick, his palette mostly penumbral but lit with shards of color, as if excavated. A precedent is set here in the 1997 abstraction Horizon, in which a maelstrom of Philip Guston-esque pink brushstrokes overtakes the surface, seeming to rise upward toward a shred of gray horizon as well as to flow outward at the viewer. The linen is mounted on an irregular wood panel support, giving it a wobbly effect. The surprising impression of this painting that is not terribly large (at 28 by 32 inches) is one of inundation. Brickhouse worked for a time as a deep-sea fisherman and, as in Horizon—along with other works like The Sparrows (2014) and Adrift, Ship of Fools (2020)—we feel the sea in more ways than one, beyond the depiction of figures in boats. The sense is of oceanic immersion, as we are set adrift in a medium that still feels viscous.

Brickhouse is a world builder. In Andre’s Poem (2024), an awkward figure in a cerulean ground sprinkled with glitter sits at left; at the right, angels and birds coalesce and dissolve in a pale gray sky. A whole dreamlike universe has materialized for this Andre, reminiscent of Henri Michaux’s visions. The exhibition’s title, The Stationary Traveler, is also that of one of its larger paintings (2012), predominantly red, in which a solitary figure levitates above a group of small, flower-like beings with leaves joined like hands. Glitter makes the work sparkle, as if lit by phosphorescence. The ambient paint comes to life, suggesting that fantastical beings can materialize anywhere. Sometimes the effect can be spooky, as in the nocturne Howl II (2024), in which a giant goblinlike face haunts an embracing couple.

Whether in the deliberately clumsy, pathos-charged figures that recall Chaïm Soutine, or in the gray atmospherics of American marine painting—particularly that of Albert Pinkham Ryder—art history circulates throughout. In one work, The Deplorables (After Goya), the past is more explicit. Here the allusions are dual, since the painting dates to 2016, with Hillary Clinton’s doomed words embedded in title and depiction. A reworking of Goya’s 1797–98 painting Witches’ Sabbath, which features a goatlike Satan seated on the ground, directing unspeakable doings, we can guess the identity of Brickhouse’s avatar, similarly posed, as pale, ghoulish heads pay witness in a purplish night. Tyrants Fall (2017) extends the theme in grisly fashion, as a supine corpse, raw and red, is observed by two rats and by small heads projecting from the edges as if waiting for a fire’s grotesque repast to cool.

The characters Brickhouse fashions can be at once tender and absurd. In Hero (2022), one of the two sculptures on view, an abstract assemblage combining a gourd torso and a somewhat obscene lower extremity of lead pipe and a tin acorn cap strikes a jaunty attitude. In The Orchid Lover (2025), the artist dresses a female figure in a luxurious stole of flowers while, below, an attached panel presents a still life as if to suggest, here is what you can do with these. To darker effect, To the River (2021) presents a figure bearing a dead or dying dog with all the solicitude of an ancient good shepherd, and Drunken Angel (2025) pairs a malevolent angel with a stiff, featureless, partial corpse. At just twelve inches square and mostly gray, with bits of pinkish flesh tones, it bears its outsize message with no fanfare whatsoever, as the doomed pair seem to be just short of melting into the matter that constitutes them.