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Kevin Brazil
Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Art Review, art-agenda, Studio International, and elsewhere. He is writing a book about queer happiness.

Articles Available Online


Alvaro Barrington, Garvey: Sex Love Nurturing Famalay

Art Review

October 2019

Kevin Brazil

Art Review

October 2019

The unofficial anthem of this year’s London Carnival was ‘Famalay’, a bouyon-influenced soca song that won the Road March in Trinidad & Tobago’s Carnival...

Essay

October 2018

The Uses of Queer Art

Kevin Brazil

Essay

October 2018

In June 2018 a crowd assembled in Tate Britain to ask: ‘What does a queer museum look like?’ Surrounded...

In the light-filled rooms of The Piper Gallery is a painting show that features no paint Brought together by artist Tess Jaray under the title The Edge of Painting, the twelve works are by names that are rarely associated with painting such as Rana Begum, Cornelia Parker, Tom Lomax and Cathy de Monchaux With work chosen for its painterly qualities but rendered in materials including 3-D print, rattlesnake venom and 16mm film, the exhibition offers, as Jaray states in her curator’s foreword, ‘no answers, but it does pose many questions’   Posing my own questions to Tess Jaray in her north London home, I realise how much the exhibition reveals about her own work The piece of her own that she includes in the show, ‘Migration, Wide, Orange’ (2013), is listed with deliberate ambiguity as ‘work on panel’ Like the exhibition itself, it is a strong, colourful statement that combines the visual punch and cool intellectualism that characterises Jaray’s work   As visual artist, writer and tutor (she was the first woman to teach at the Slade), Jaray has kept faith with a formal language of light and geometry that is both constant and infinitely renewable In her work, precise groups of shapes are arranged on absolutely flat grounds to investigate the elemental effects that pattern, repetition and colour have on our perceptions From the mid-1990s Jaray started increasingly to write about other artists’ work, and in 2001 she collaborated with the German writer W G Sebald, pairing visual responses to fragments from The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo In 2010 she published her collected writings under the title Painting: Mysteries and Confessions   On my way to meet Jaray I turn the wrong way out of Caledonian Road station and arrive late; something that she later tells me is because I failed to frame my journey properly She is gracious in spite of my trouble with framing, and I am warmly invited into her home, which, rather like her show, exhibits a pleasing selection of disparate materials and colours White walls and pale contemporary floors play host to worn dark

Contributor

July 2018

Kevin Brazil

Contributor

July 2018

Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London...

Nora Ikstena's ‘Soviet Milk’

Book Review

August 2018

Kevin Brazil

Book Review

August 2018

Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena opens with two women who cannot remember. ‘I don’t remember 15 October 1969,’ says the first. ‘I don’t remember...

READ NEXT

fiction

March 2013

If Not, Not

Natasha Soobramanien

fiction

March 2013

This story may or may not end in Venice and in silent, unacknowledged tragedy but let it begin here,...

poetry

Issue No. 3

Camera & Even After He is Gone, the Cat is Here and I Cast My Suspicions on Him

Toshiko Hirata

TR. Jeffrey Angles

poetry

Issue No. 3

Camera You take my sweet sleeping face You take my innocent smile You take my large breasts Even though...

poetry

October 2015

Two Poems

Robert Herbert McClean

poetry

October 2015

Another Autumn Journal Chaos (AKA Do Not Put This to Music Because You’re How Fish Put Up a Fight)...

 

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