Jenny Brillhart & Samuel Guy: Stages of Presence

At first glance, the paintings of Jenny Brillhart and Sam Guy seem to be operating in vastly different modes: Brillhart’s muted canvases elegantly capture the play of light and shadow in interiors, while Guy’s self-portraits negotiate and confiscate different mythological characters on heavily worked surfaces. So how do we read these two artists through each other? How can we see Guy’s works anew by apprehending them through Brillhart’s, and how can we see what is transpiring in Brillhart’s paintings by way of Guy’s?

In his new body of work, Guy continues exploring the mysteries of self-invention, riskily enlisting the self not so much as a bounded thing than infinite characters that co-habitate with us but rarely make an appearance. In his paintings, he allows each such character or identity to appear fully. Many of these characters in his previous self-portraits were pulled from middle America’s tropes of masculinity, but in this current show we see a wider range of identities at play: a pirate, a poet, a truck driver, Ernest Shackleton, a bourgeois university dean. Much of the action of self-construction in these portraits materializes through markers of fashion; the artist owns all pieces of clothing featured in these paintings, sourcing them from thrift stores, vintage stores, the streets of his Brooklyn neighborhood, Depop, military surplus stores, among others.

Created over multiple sittings in front of a mirror, Guy’s self-portraits suggest that selfhood is not what gets certified on one’s driver’s license—the rational administrative language of age or gender or height, which settles the matter too quickly—but something weirder, like a series of moments that manifest as a series of different characters. And sure, these different characters might be conscious decisions we make about our subjectivity and identity, as modern paradigms of singular individuality would have it, but Guy’s paintings hint at the more unsettling reality of selfhood, i.e. how sometimes we gradually become who we are expected to perform whether we want to or not, or how we occupy a whole bunch of contradictory subjectivities at once.

But it would be a disservice to reduce Guy’s paintings to its subject matter of the performance of the self. Performativity is not only the content of his paintings, but its form as well—we should pay attention to the ways in which the painting or the canvas itself is performing. And this may be where we can find surprising resonances with Brillhart’s work. How do Guy’s paintings perform? Some of his canvases are shaped, conforming to the shape of the figure and staging its own drama alongside that of the figure. There are subtle elements of trompe l’oeil, and the built-up impasto of paint on the chalked surfaces is its own form of performance. The density of his paintings calls to mind what Philip Guston said about Rembrandt’s self-portraits: “Rembrandt seems to be so dense; you feel that if you peeled off a piece of forehead or eye, you know, as if you’d opened up this little trapdoor, there’d be a millennium of teeming stuff going on.”

Brillhart’s paintings are devoid of figures—she is inspired by the incidental alignment of shapes in the world, and her works pay close attention to details like corners, walls, and surfaces. Interested in the humble, unsung, and tactile, Brillhart’s paintings evoke a quiet dignity, a classical sense of permanence and solidity. Most of the paintings are frontal with minimal depth in the compositions, but even so there is something deeply performative about the way in which Brillhart arrives at these paintings. Often, she will set up objects against a wall in her studio and record the light passing through the interiors. One of these stills might end up as a composition for a painting. The drawn-out process of the movement and arrangement of objects, of the flight of light across these objects, constitute something like a performance at the heart of her paintings.

Informing Brillhart’s practice is the Shaker sensibility of the oneness of function and beauty. She grew up in Canterbury, New Hampshire, frequenting a nearby historic Shaker Village and working in their kitchen at one point in middle school. In actualizing their vision of heaven-on-earth, the Shakers treated making and moving furniture with equal importance as praying, and famously hung chairs on wall pegs in order to sweep the floors. This ritual of laying bare the interiors so that light can come in and make its own geometry of the walls and floors (as Brillhart wonderfully puts it), of devotionally rearranging objects and making room, calibrates her own practice of making paintings. She is interested in how light and shadow coax objects out of their everyday complacency, suturing together objects that otherwise have very different textures. In works like French Tub (2025), the performativity of her process shows up in more explicitly material ways: Brillhart manipulated printed photographs by folding and cutting to create new schemes of shadows and light from the overlapping papers.

Still life paintings like Leftovers (2025) take as its subject matter pieces of drywall and wood on a shelf, composed in a low-relief setup. The shelf plays a key part of the composition, setting the groundwork for a delicate handling of light. These still life paintings look like picturesque accidents, and they bring to mind Proust’s observation that in the still life paintings by the 18th century French painter Chardin, vision and touch work cooperatively. That is, vision performs like touch in the still lifes, and therefore, sensory knowledge and rational knowledge are inseparable. Similarly, in Brillhart’s work, everything we see in the painting is caressed into being—nothing is glossed over, but given gravity and weight and probity. Her paintings stage a divine equality of forms: the piece of drywall is given as much tactile agency as its shadow, and the corner of the fireplace mantel in Two Bedrooms (2025) is given as much seriousness as the wall behind it. — Emily Chun