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Zac Brenner is 'Live on Air' at Smoke the Moon
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SANTA FE — Zac Brenner’s solo exhibition, “Live on Air,” at Smoke the Moon, is the visual equivalent of a great lo-fi beats playlist. The paintings don’t always make narrative sense, but they don’t need to. We feel them haptically.
For the uninitiated, lo-fi beats is a 21st century music genre consisting of mellow, sample-based grooves by basement producers, most of whom use intentionally misspelled nom de plumes like Drxnk, hoodeeny, silkwürm and Czapter. The “lo-fi” aspect refers to intentional imperfections, like the dusty hiss of vintage records or the sleepy warp of half-melted cassette tapes, a hallmark of the sound. Unlike more aggressive uses of noise in music, the soft distortions of lo-fi beats are warm and comforting.
Brenner distorts the proportions of everything from human figures to conch shells and model trains. But unlike Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon, Francesco Clemente and other artists who have used distortion to creep out their audiences, Brenner’s lo-fi distortions are oddly soothing.
Like Jennifer Sullivan’s lumpy, droopy domestic still-life paintings, Brenner’s cluttered arrangements of waxy objects possess an endearing, humanoid awkwardness. The distortion heightens their textural qualities, while encouraging us to anthropomorphize them. Philip Guston and some of the so-called “bad painting” movement painters like Charles Garabedian did similar things in the 1970s, as did post-impressionists like Paul Cézanne in the 1880s.
Cézanne remains a divisive figure, with some 21st century critics continuing to rail against his “aggressive absurdities of disproportion” and “hapless dabbing of the brush.” But for folks like me — and Brenner, I presume — those are features, not flaws. Brenner’s squishy plants and rubbery conch shells activate our haptic receptors as much as Cézanne’s Nerf-ball apples and oranges do, putting us in touch with our sense of touch, as it were.
Like many lo-fi beats songs, Brenner’s paintings have a distinctly crate-digging, thrift-store 1970s feel. His swamp green, terracotta orange, avocado and salmon hues conjure a world of mushroom lamps, Chia Pets and deep shag carpeting.
In “Box of Rain” (2023), “Earth Journey” (2023) and “Encountering Mantis” (2023), Brenner brightens this autumnal palette with concentrated bursts of blue raspberry, pink lemonade and grape soda colors. It’s hard to know what’s going on in these paintings, on a literal level, with any precision. But from what I can gather, the plant that the Grateful Dead fan removes from his aquarium in “Box of Rain” mutates a la “Little Shop of Horrors” into an all-encompassing aquatic jungle in the other two paintings, dwarfing its human subject.
In Brenner’s nighttime paintings “Tube-Man Prologue” (2024) and “Ghost Coast Nocturne” (2024), the ’70s palette is occluded by dark inky blue washes. Again, I’m reminded of Cézanne, who wanted viewers to feel the weight and dampness of the atmosphere in his landscapes. Brenner pushes that idea to the max, submerging his nighttime scenes in a gelatinous cobalt goo — sludgy, psychotropic Cézannes for the lo-fi beats generation.
Some of Brenner’s color effects are difficult to appreciate in photographs and demand to be experienced in person. By scraping and washing away layers in works like “Lifting Weights” (2024) and “Moment Between” (2025), he creates vibrational fields of overlapping complementary colors, much as Katherine Bradford does. But Brenner is a much more freewheeling painter than Bradford, allowing all manner of bizarre, beautiful things to sprout and grow in his densely layered compositions.
The power of Brenner’s exhibition is diluted somewhat by the inclusion of “Helen Pinch” (2024) and “Dillon Sachs with His Portrait of Leonard Pickard” (2024), two fairly conventional portraits that lack the weirdness, compositionally and colorwise, of the other works. But “Live on Air” is the Santa Fe native’s first solo exhibition, and it’s full of many more hits than misses. I’m sure we’ll be seeing much more of him in the coming years.
