It’s About F***ing Time

March 18th – April 17th, 2022

Curated by Amelia Biewald

The Royal @ RSOAA is pleased to present It’s About F***ing Time, an exhibition curated by Amelia Biewald featuring Paul Brainard.

“Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it…at any moment the rip can occur, the edges fly back, and the giant maw will be revealed.”
– Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

Paul Brainard’s drawings and paintings invite us to travel with him to a shrouded land of liminal spaces, both bizarre and familiar. Like dreams whose cadence you can’t describe, his works lurch and lumber through a dominion disfigured yet defined by everyday media saturation, tinged with attendant despair.

From the smoothed incisions of antique gravestones to the babble of images in bundled newsprint, Brainard leans into a feedback loop of self-reflection, questioning the compromises we make in the banalities of life that provide us daily with a temporary spiritual safety. His works attempt to capture a void, a moon’s far side deepening a well of blackness encircled by a lethally vast starfield.

Brainard compels us in these works to weigh the value of artificiality against the reality we can grasp in hand, with the time we have; a non-factual but poetic biography. Time and memory are unmasked as unreliable crewmates on this expedition.

Judgment and core mentality are whispered questions in Brainard’s art, a strange grammar hinting at the restless traces of his process.