Anything that makes you feel connected to the world and humanity. If you feel it, then others will feel it; and that feeling is the point.” AD_AD
Adam Disbrow is a contemporary American expressionist painter, based in Charlottesville, Virginia. The alternate moniker he assigned himself, AD_AD, is suggestive of this painter’s awareness of cosmic timelessness.
Disbrow’s oeuvre is a combination of the ubiquitous, counterpoised elements of spirituality where dichotomy emerges from work which are complex in execution and yet simple in artistic statement, affirming profound implications. He examines the meaning of existence in his pieces struggling with the question of the “why” on the journey of “being” while approaching life’s enigmatic perplexity.
He considers painters such as Cy Twombly, Clyfford Still, Jasper Johns, Anselm Kiefer, Pierre Soulages, Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others, influences. He finds that art mirrors truth, and so, builds his pieces in paint layers with varying colors, sheens, textures, and symbols to momentarily break down created barriers, allowing symbol and concept to convey veracity via mind and eye.
Dansaekhwa artist, Ha Chong-Hyun, a pioneer of the 1970s Korean monochrome art movement and Kazuo Shiraga, a Japanese artist best known for performative painting in the Gutai avant-garde movement, also help define Disbrow’s work as tangible and simultaneously inscrutably metaphysical. Soulages’ influential use of darkness in his pieces helped to inspire Disbrow’s sense of mystery in his creations.
Incorporating 24k gold leaf as dualistic symbols to represent oppositional concepts of humanity’s highest aspirations along with its crassest purposes, he layers pigment with some painted passages both covered and exposed, bringing an almost entropic randomness to an alchemical stew of creation and destruction representing the transmogrification of materials from vulgarity to a higher state to the work. Self-awareness drives his motivations, and, the tragic pandemic’s scourge further forced his creative explorations of mortality, producing digital images as comments on history and culture, life and death, the sacred and profane.
Cherl Crews, artistic director of SPAC Gallery explains, “Adam Disbrow has become well known for pairing physical (pigment) and digital (pixel) art and has been established as a leading figure in digital art, through his merging of the two platforms.”
(SPAC Gallery, located in Sperryville, Viriginia was co-founded by Disbrow in 2014 and provides a local venue for his work. spacgallery.org). To interpret the pieces, Disbrow generously provides us with iconography, creating a symbolic, alchemically tinged, visual language. He offers a single square with a line going through it, signifying a fractal or quantum unit, a building block of creation or more conceptually, the soul. Gold squares are found through his works. “Behind all physical things in creation, there is an unseen prior thought or intention. In the way that a physical table is the product of the craftsman’s design, or an interaction between two people is reflective of the feelings between them. The gold square represents the sacred and profane unseen behind all of creation.” Multiple squares with lines going through them indicate how consciousness is tied to reality through perspective. His use of silver represents the ephemerality of physical art due to this metal’s ability to tarnish and oxidize, altering characteristics that contrast with unchanging numericity.
Disbrow links some additional imagery of the binary sequence as emblems of created reality, and his renderings of barbed wire signify consciousness that he deems caged inside the body. For him, crosses, sometimes grouped in fours, refer to the four Greek muses devoted to the arts. Drawing a tongue on a string—or the “wagging tongue”—he alludes indirectly to the conversational qualities found in nature.
He also explains that a crown in his works stands for legacy, while forks and spoons, allusions to Munch and John’s expressionism, conjure tactile sensations of pleasure, taste, sex and fertility.
Three jagged lines represent the electromagnetic field while the bare breast signifies lust and desire. Most importantly, the red heart symbolizes mortality, the white heart, immortality, and the black one, death. “My work is a commentary on history and culture. I am interested in relationships of opposition—specifically life and death and the sacred and profane. Duality, dichotomy, and reversal.”
Three circles imply a trinity, the “cogs of creation,” mind, body and soul, metaphysical, physical and celestial representations or, in Christian lore, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One over Ten or Ten over One, equaling Eleven, stands for the binary code of created reality. And most significantly, the Fountain of Creation represents the spiraling gyre of the cosmos. Unlike William Blake’s imagery of a widening galactic turn toward chaos in one of his well-known poems, Adam Disbrow’s paintings try to give order to creation’s mysteries through symbols. Bravely tackling cosmic inscrutability, he attempts to assign language to the unanswered questions we’ve pondered throughout time. G&S
adamdisbrow.com
Colonna Contemporary, Wayne, PA represents Adam Disbrow colonnacontemporary.com
Leave a Comment