Brach Tiller

TRUE ROMANCE

September-October 2022

Like the Tarantino flick from which the exhibition borrows its title, TRUE ROMANCE considers the lover a product of all that surrounds them—including their beloved and the oft-severe backdrop of industrial Detroit. Unlike its namesake, artist Brach Tiller's vision of the metropolis makes explicit the ambiguities of intimacy through vivid abstractions in which no single material or shape is entirely recognizable. That said, it's still a love story. Reflecting on his past year in the city, Tiller paints snapshots of Detroit seen through the complex machinery of romantic memory, as though a virtual portal to the experience of loving in the city encountered through a set of non-human senses. The resulting exhibition features nine vignettes of amorphous object scapes which feel vaguely familiar yet viscerally unsettling in their strangeness, methodically weaving in and out of one another, and rendered in strikingly glossy photorealism despite mimicking no discernible reality.

Each painting in TRUE ROMANCE details scenes from an unreliable narrator in an unreliable world where the lines between fact and fiction, subject and object, lover and loved become blurred. In Red Wing Gardens, anchor-like shapes upon closer inspection suggest urban lampposts, yet arranged in bunches they become a tableau of floral bouquets. In the titanic A Place with Windows, a singular tower looms over the viewer in gleaming jewel-tones with mirror-like windows reflecting silhouetted specters; the artist conjured the image after a conversation with his lover about his disappointment in the lack of lighting in his studio. Tiller uses painting as an exercise in simulation: one in which the reality being referenced is always called into question, despite the simulation always seeming to pale in comparison to the reality desired. Metals flowing like water and golden castles reminiscent of sand illustrate a portrait of desire and lack in love through a case study of longing for wide, open spaces (even if they were only ever a fantasy).

Brach Tiller creates hypnagogic paintings whose meticulous execution and farcical ambiguity blur the lines between fact and fiction. Using digital physics to create a simulation of reality which is unclear, yet recognizable, Tiller renders scenes with great mass whose clean and flat surface echoes the two-dimensional screens which increasingly mediate our interpersonal communication. The humor embedded in the tension between reality and unreality lends an absurdist balance between optimism and nihilism, questioning the new forms of expression in cross-embedded media which might reveal humanity’s innate fluidity. He received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2021 and lives and works in Detroit.

Press release written by Lindsey Scott Lascaux.

A Place with Windows
60” x 37”
Oil on canvas
2022

Hi-Polymer Harbor
13” x24”
Oil on canvas stretched on panel
2022

Origin
16” x 16”
Oil on canvas stretched on panel
2022

Red Wing Gardens
24” x24”
Oil on canvas stretched on panel
2022

Stranger
40” x 30”
Oil on canvas
2022

Lane Beach
36” x 36”
Oil on canvas stretched on panel
2022

Left to Right:
Satellite of Affection
12” x 15”
Oil on canvas stretched on panel
2022
Satellite of Love
12” x 15”
Oil on canvas stretched on panel
2022