Can art be fully realized in a vacuum, alone? Is an audience required to complete the circuit, to define and prove its existence? While frequently made alone, there is so often the intention to communicate something personal to others. To bridge a gap and connect.

 

Brad Eberhard has been making paintings and ceramic sculptures that are complex in their construction and intimately scaled, hovering between abstraction to figuration. The compositional rhythms of shapes and colors, as well as the emergence of representational content, grow intuitively. The works are adjacent to self-portraiture, in their revelations of Eberhard’s unique constellations of visual associations. They open brief glimpses into an internal library of accumulated ideas assembled over a lifetime. The contexts and connotations influencing how he sees the world unfold. Allusions to archeology, literature, years of record collecting, the geometry of sporting rules, folklore, art history, woven patterns, mysticism, his son’s favorite patterned shirts, and so much more come in and out of focus. In total, an oblique diary, recording and sharing his voice, his observations and responses.

 

The subjects almost always reveal an optimistic curiosity about the world. A thoughtfulness both about how other artists have tackled subjects, and how humanity in general has tried to wrap their heads around all the unknowable questions inherent to life. Loose themes surface in particular threads of work. A fascination with plants and animals, like birds, fish, and snakes, that have become hardwired in our collective thoughts as symbolic visuals. Certain pieces ponder mythologies around death, funeral practices, and our various speculations about the afterlife; although in the spirt of Oscar Wilde’s famed aversions to talking about serious topics seriously Eberhard has a healthy appreciation for absurdity.

 

Eberhard contemplates what the limits and the possibilities of paintings are, what can be evoked in a single frame to work with, can multiple things happen at once on a canvas. The Red Studio by Matisse is a recurring anchor in his thoughts due to its compression of space, and worlds within the world achieved through each painting within the painting. He aspires to the mystery of Jasper Johns’ symbols, and the mystical quality of Twombly’s work, knowing from the start the loftiness of such goals and that it won’t ever really work, but the efforts propel his work forward nonetheless and lead to something new.

 

While the history of painting swirls in Eberhard’s thoughts making these works, his new body of ceramic sculptures feels engaged with a much grander swath of human history. The medium predating written language and agriculture. Rife with fascinating histories of convergent and divergent evolutions of forms over time in far flung geographies. His manipulations of these earthen forms resulting in a new series of small sculpted heads. They are an instantly intriguing cast of characters, humans and animals, each overflowing with a distinct personality They began to grow in number over the last year, occupying shelves and nooks around his studio.

 

They came to feel like a regular audience, a crowd of supporters, a cast of collaborators, a peanut gallery of critics. As they silently watched him work they seemingly responded to each other’s expressions as well. They induced meditations on living audiences, past, present, and future. Both those who generously look at and support his own art, as well as the community that has grown around Alto Beta, an artist-run gallery Eberhard has operated in recent years. Building this audience of peers over time can feel like a piece itself. Artists tinker and build objects alone in their studio and then hope they connect, that they might have some meaning for others too. They say wordless things with them. They illustrate how they see things, hoping that it is insightful to others. The audience becomes essential.

 

Eberhard lives in Montrose and works in Altadena. Much of the last two decades he worked with influential local galleries, first Thomas Solomon Gallery and then VIELMETTER. Eberhard’s work is included in the public collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; and Pomona College Museum of Art, CA; Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, CA; Tang Museum, NY; Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, UT.