Saxon Brice's Diametric of Myth and Modernity

Saxon Brice, TRONTAVIUS, 2024, Charcoal, sanguine and sepia conté, and gouache on paper, 25.5 x 19.5 in

By CARLOTA GAMBOA October, 2024

Though “art was always at the core” of Saxon Brice’s practice and endeavors, the multimedia artist has tried on a fair share of hats within the trade. Besides speaking with us about what shows he’s currently watching with his fiancé—namely Apple TV’s Slow Horses—the painter and retired film industry art department hand delved into what it means to dualistically reach into both the past and the future. Laced with anachronism and allusion, Saxon’s latest works create technological myths that lay bare the metaphoric conditions of our collective. This, paired with a style that transports the viewer back toward canonic paintings, is set through the contemporary lens. With portraits that lend themselves to a classical realism, and charcoal sketches that scream Raphael-meets-Orwell, Saxon Brice finds his artistic voice within the constraints of formal technique.

The grandson of the mid-century abstract symbolist and UCLA art professor, William Brice, Saxon relates his relationship to art-making like that of a “fish swimming in water.” His family, foundational in supplying an understanding of art history and its traditions, also encouraged him with a liberty to exhaust whichever pathways presented themselves, and that he did. Saxon’s adventurous pursuits ranged from acting to set design and he practiced his skill in a variety of sectors before landing in the realm of formalized classical painting. Despite his BFA from Parsons, received in 2010, it wouldn't be until the next decade that Brice would find his specialization in fine art. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t working in the field leading up to it. In 2019, Brice was commissioned to make 27 paintings for Dan Gilroy’s Netflix horror-satire Velvet Buzzsaw. Starring Jake Gyllynhal, Toni Collette, and Rene Russo, the film follows a group of LA art scene snobs that stumble upon the late Vetril Dease’s body of work, dropping them into dangerous territory. Brice was charged with creating the posthumously discovered paintings, and though only five made it into the final cut, their importance was pivotal to the story’s  progression.

Saxon Brice, MOYRA, 2024, Charcoal, sanguine and sepia conté, and gouache on paper, 25.5 x 19.5 in

Perhaps this major commission played a role in Brice’s decision to return to school when the opportunity turned up. Brice attended the Florence Academy of Arts to close a gap he felt was present in his technique. “The biggest challenge going into that classical training is getting your head around ways of looking,” he says about the experience. “There’s an intense critical eye needed to capture reality in its finest subtlety, there’s a need to embrace objectivity from the entrenched modern sensitivities of subjectivity.” Brice is frank about the trials of unlearning and relearning in order to expand his perspective, but does so while emphasizing the retainment of his sincerity and aesthetic vision. In a time when the driving impetus of a “rockstar artist is that artist’s inner world,” Brice attempts to blend that narrative with both tradition and the contemporary.

The use of hyperrealism, seen so often through our screens in movies and television, has unarguably fallen out of vogue when speaking of contemporary art, but still…there’s something so emotive in these small moments of precision. Like the quiet and impactful still-lives of Spanish artist Isabele Quintanilla, Saxon Brice wishes to dial into a past history in order to better understand the present. He shares that once, surrounded by the work of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, he realized: “This is what I want to do, but I’d have to figure out how to make it relevant, and since we’re not in a Catholic doctrinal time, it’s no longer a relevant language. How do I find a way to mimic that? The swirling spiritual uplift?”

In the face of postmodernity, deep-seeded irony and cynicism, how does an artist embrace the relationship between sincerity and critical deconstruction? Between a personal style and the objective eye? Between the canonical past and the accelerated future? It’s a push and pull, but one that Brice doesn’t shirk from. Brice wishes to embrace something “really binding, humanizing and empathetic.” And portraits were not a bad  way to realize that desire.

Saxon Brice, JESSI, 2024, Oil on canvas 40 x 30 in

In his recent new solo exhibition VIBE // SHIFT, at In The Meantime in Los Angeles, the work is dedicated to “immortalizing the characters bearing witness to vibe shifts.” Brice mentioned that he desires his portraits to behave as an “unexpected biography” of their subjects. Like Hans Holbein’s attention to character, a life’s story is often found in the little details of a psychological world, and Brice wants these worlds to come alive. “I loved envisioning myself in someone else's shoes,” he mentions. “I would twist them into a kind of character, wanting their personal style to be told in a mysterious way that might come out during the course of a lifetime. I wanted to create an image that engages in a dialogue that changes every day and reveals itself to you. A piece that has a life of its own and haunts the person represented.”

Saxon Brice. Photo by Aubrie Wienholt

Though the series of portraits culminate in a conversation between traditional lineage and modern sensibilities, his charcoal drawings engage more of a still unknown future. The images move into myths of their own making, as faces that could be pulled out of renaissance circa work are paired abruptly with wires, circuit boards, cryptic machines, and scrawings like protect your passcode. This juxtaposition, the binding of religious narratives with contemporary images, becomes a kind of herald to the archive left behind by AI and technology. How will history understand the current cultural climate when so much of art hinges on a kind of reproducibility?

Saxon Brice also tells me, “The best time to be creating art is now,” and he’s right. If not us, if not now, then who, and what, and when? WM

To learn more about Saxon Brice, please visit his website and follow on Instagram @saxisfaction