The Orphic Review

Brett Eduard Zaravetz (born 1992) is a Canadian painter & mixed media artist, currently based out of Montreal, Quebec. His paintings, drawings and collage works are all imbued with the spontaneous gestural qualities of abstract expressionism while suggestive of some deeper hidden sense of iconography. His works often refer to a narrative or the figurative which is conveyed via a fragmented perception.

STATEMENT:

I never really know what it is that I’m about to make before I start a piece…

So my studio practice usually begins with me taking more of an “automatic” approach to whatever medium I’m working with. Generating works rapidly and trying to establish some sort of rhythm. I place more of an emphasis on gesture and my immediate response to mark making rather than any internal thought process. I try to just tap into my intuition especially for my paintings and drawings where I usually don’t venture beyond this sort of automatic approach - though there are some exceptions where I’ll reference studies.

As for my collage process, it typically starts in the same manner. I create a batch of works in an automatic fashion but with the specific intent of cutting them up.

Indulging a little bit into that child-like tendency I have to want to destroy something after having made it… not so much in a harmful way but more just out of curiosity… to see all the working parts. It’s that sort of prismatic or exploded view of things that has always been really appealing to me.

But perhaps more importantly it’s not until this part of my process where I'm looking through that “exploded perspective” and way of seeing that I usually begin to discover and draw out the more figurative elements of my work. The cut-ups really allow me to pull out and distill any signs or symbols that may have been hidden within the initial drawings and that I can use and bend to create some sort of narrative. It really becomes quite fun because the relationship of everything to one another is pretty much lawless and almost out of nowhere you can start to build up these almost spectral landscapes. The collages leave plenty of space for hiding things which you only discover after letting your eyes bounce around within the piece. In the end it’s mostly about maintaining a sense of play and continuing this process of discovery and letting the work reveal itself to me while I'm making it that I'm interested in.

- Brett