I: A FANTASIA OF HORROR

“Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.” (Francisco Goya)

Lauren Brown’s universe is deliberately, deliciously unsettling. She paints lavish amphitheatres of Gothic terror, employing bold, bruising brushwork to propel a palette of putrefaction as germinal as it is nullifying. Any attempted appreciation of ground, protagonist or narrative on the part of her viewer is made increasingly problematic by Brown’s entanglement of those trinities of time, space and dimension - subject, object and abject - all now arrested by a dark, seductive synergy oozing with the fecund of fear, imbuing her surfaces with a heady tension that is both physical and psychological; both apocalyptic and libidinal; both assertive and ambiguous.

Lauren Brown, A Storm to Worship, 2025, Oil on canvas, 180 x 200 cm (70 7/8 x 78 3/4 in)

Lauren Brown, A Storm to Worship, 2025, Oil on canvas, 180 x 200 cm (70 7/8 x 78 3/4 in)

Take a painting like A Storm to Worship (2025). Whilst this work does not set out to celebrate or adumbrate any sense of consternation or abhorrence at the world in which we live, the notes Brown sounds here sing of forms coiling, colliding, of structures and planes melting in arcs of gooey, gory deliquescence. There are no specific actors in this storm, necessarily employed to convey a specific story; rather, Brown’s powerful gesture, compositional confidence and aphotic chroma all unveil the agency of a praxis determined to root its viewer in the blood and guts of the very act of looking whilst simultaneously transporting them to realms ethereal, ghostly and sublime.

Brown insists on her viewer being both inside and outside – of both the terrain of her painted surfaces and the conundrum of their physical and psychological selves when engaging with such surfaces – as they fall in and out of her work. It is this ineluctable symbiosis between object and viewer, between the viscera, litotes and experience of human anatomy and the panorama, hyperbole and mystery of myth, religion, art or literature, that sets the stage onto which the fantasy and horror of such monstrous reason plays out, shaped by Brown in A Storm to Worship with alluring arabesques of hue and shade as bewitching as they are grotesque.

The result is an electrifying body of new work that truly delves into the darker corners of selfhood, teasing the viewer to unpick moments of their own truth from a ground that flourishes in delectable contradistinction. The viewer is left peering into the enigma of either the abyss or themselves, asking of Brown’s shapes and movements, marks and colours what is and what is not real, imagined, organic, familiar or even significant. Any test of understanding is thus not posed by the viewer, but by Brown’s paintings and the fantasia of horror they so beautifully, cruelly unveil.

II: FIX AND FLUX

“I find great pleasure in juxtaposing strength and vulnerability in my paintings.” (Peter Paul Rubens)

The instability Brown generates – be that driven by paint or index – begins with an ambition to fix a sense of flux. To isolate and then compound - as individual gesture or as a lattice of building blocks – those elements that whisper scared secrets of sacred spaces and the turmoil of being they elevate but, likewise, dissolve any propensity for certainty or security by instead ushering in an existential wobble to ground, form and phrase. It is an impermanence and disequilibrium that both haunts yet invigorates the ebb of Albert Oehlen’s flow (an artist much admired my Brown) where line and ground equally seem to chase their own condensation.

Flux is first infuriated by Brown’s commanding line, fizzing across her ground in rivulets of fidget and shards of dart that if not delineating prosaically certainly serve to adumbrate poetically all shapes and glazes of possible meaning. It is a curious, searching line; one that charges the painted air around it like a strike of lightning - antagonising and illuminating – yet which doesn’t necessarily articulate any recognisable form in doing so. Brown’s line massages and manipulates her ground, corralling and collecting blooms of colour and swathes of amoebic gesture into coherent passages of paint, only to then penetrate such movement and incite a series of deflations. It is this coalescence of fixity and fluidity – proposing the vulnerability of an uncertain space and then interrogating that susceptibility in a most offensive manner – that so marks Brown’s creative enterprise. These are surfaces that are both empowered and fragile; both passive and aggressive. Not one, nor either, but both.

Lauren Brown, Fever Dream, 2025, Oil on canvas, 190 x 240 cm (74 3/4 x 94 1/2 in)

Lauren Brown, Fever Dream, 2025, Oil on canvas, 190 x 240 cm (74 3/4 x 94 1/2 in)

The title of Fever Dream (2025) announces Brown’s dialogue (and nexus) between dynamos of power and control and an ever-shifting plasma of possibility. The entire composition operates as an interconnected framework swinging seamlessly between moments andante and adagio. Swift, ebony lines quickly bring together scraped and smeared sections of lilac, tangerine and burgundy paint, all served with a light, often diaphanous, silky touch. Elongated tubular forms extend in and out of a central crescendo of marks that, like Piranesi’s malevolent staircases, seek some shape of registration yet hum in a never-ending contest between decomposition and regeneration. The visual charge Brown brings to her painting is not necessarily generated by her attention to compositional unity, but it is choreographed by it. Even if her surface appears haphazard or reflexive, there is close attention paid by Brown to elements of hue, density, shape and line which, in many ways, chimes with the compositional frames employed by a painter like Rubens, where moments of minute, sensorial connection triggered a fuller, fleshier acceptance of both his design as a whole and the narrative he would seek to explore.

Lauren Brown, The Fist and the Throat, 2025, Oil on canvas, 190 x 220 cm (74 3/4 x 86 5/8 in)

Lauren Brown, Devours, 2025, Oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm (23 5/8 x 19 3/4 in)

Lauren Brown, The Fist and the Throat, 2025, Oil on canvas, 190 x 220 cm (74 3/4 x 86 5/8 in)

Lauren Brown, Devours, 2025, Oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm (23 5/8 x 19 3/4 in)

The same ‘scape throbs with the same incessant pain and poignancy in The Fist and the Throat (2025). The drier, more agitated orange ground is more apparent in this painting, not just permeating but now provoking Brown’s line into interrogation. Veils of claret and raspberry linger over Brown’s complex abstraction, serving not to obfuscate but rather amplify the furore of a surface that endlessly folds in and on itself. Oftentimes it is Brown’s smaller canvases that best betray her conversation with ground and line. Likewise, it is these smaller works that also allow the viewer to focus on Brown’s uncanny ability to eke out a fleshy abjection from her visual syntax. Devours (2025) pulsates with a strong scaffold of horizontals and verticals yet is balanced by lighter scumbles of fiery reds and golden oranges. To the left one can find a strange form that – at least for a second – registers as a crumple of heavy flesh, sitting at odds with a compositional structure that, after a while, starts to take on the dark energy of a pyre. Each of these marks sit up on this smaller canvas with more authority, in turn displaying both the zing of Brown’s brush and the transformative power of gesture as one mark consumes another, just like flames, leaving behind only a suffocated mirage of what once was.

III: A CAST OF CREDOS AND CREATURES

“Despite everything, I persist in trying to fix in resin the traces of our body: I am convinced that of all the manifestations of the ephemeral, the human body is the most vulnerable, the only source of all joy, all suffering, and all truth.” (Alina Szapocznikow)

Lauren Brown, Blood Tide, 2025, Oil on canvas, 150 x 170 cm (59 x 66 7/8 in)

Lauren Brown, Blood Tide, 2025, Oil on canvas, 150 x 170 cm (59 x 66 7/8 in)

One need not contemplate Brown’s terroir of terror for too long before those dark creatures of the night begin to slowly reveal themselves; their horror initially quietly percolating through the artist’s compositions like a slow of bubble of osmotic angst, yet, soon enough, beginning to shift into more hearty, recognisable forms. These forms – always rendered in a state of agonised abbreviation – are akin to Frankenstein’s monster since they are the result of an agglutinative process; one that purloins and then manipulates a variety of grisly sources. Blood Tide (2025) continues Brown’s contest between a dark, slicing line and a ground that seems to almost evaporate in plumes of pinks and lavenders. However, it is a series of organic, mucilaginous tubes encircling the central compositional platform that give off whiffs of H. R. Giger’s Alien designs (made for Ridley Scott’s film in 1979). Above a large tube that seems to end with a snail’s antennae coils around itself as if enduring some ghoulish peristalsis; below, a spermatozoic streak zooms from painted smear into a bulbous acrosome that even offers a little, wry smile. So restless and irascible are Brown’s surfaces that even the basic DNA of her paintings and her craft – pigments and brush marks – are invested with an innate anxiety, with each mark ready to effloresce or transmogrify at any moment into an increasingly fervent march of chimera.

Lauren Brown, Chaos over Eden, 2025, Oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm (78 3/4 x 59 in)

Lauren Brown, Falling in Flame, 2025, Oil on canvas, Unframed: 35 x 25 cm (13 3/4 x 9 7/8 in)

Lauren Brown, Chaos over Eden, 2025, Oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm (78 3/4 x 59 in)

Lauren Brown, Falling in Flame, 2025, Oil on canvas, Unframed: 35 x 25 cm (13 3/4 x 9 7/8 in)

Another layer of dread is drawn from the language and signification of The Bible with many of Brown’s paintings possessing titles that make direct reference to that text. Chaos over Eden (2025) offers a particularly elaborate entanglement between line and ground or swell and stasis with large pink vapours floating across Brown’s surface in an engulfing nebulosity that appear to be attacked by a series of strident striations, as if spears were being thrown into the sky. Echoes of the body’s curvilinearity are juxtaposed with forms that suggest open mouths gnashing with serrated teeth: silhouettes that are inspired by her keen interest in the sculpture of Alina Szapocznikow. The tempo here is quick and aggressive and yet, compositionally, the work is so locked in holistically by Brown’s continued emphasis on recording both chaos and order; light and dark; matter and memory, both in isolation and in collaboration. A smaller work, Falling in Flame (2025), immediately ignites thoughts of ‘the fall of the damned’ and, indeed, Brown’s looser, swishier brushwork offers a slalom from the top of her canvas to the bottom, carving out a slide to the end of days. Cutting through this sinusoidal agitation is a single large vertical that, upon close inspection, voices itself in cruciform. The reference is so oblique as to almost not warrant any attention to it, yet the symbol remains there – bleeding into Brown’s ground, hiding in the interstices of paradox and paranoia that only religion can conjure – nurturing the artist’s desire for visual and symbolic discombobulation.

Lauren Brown, Harlot, 2025, Oil on canvas, 200 x 170 cm (78 3/4 x 66 7/8 in)

Lauren Brown, Harlot, 2025, Oil on canvas, 200 x 170 cm (78 3/4 x 66 7/8 in)

Brown’s fascination with the concept or construct of Hell goes further than just plucking out of her visual language quotations that record the heat, fear, commotion and misery of that space. Brown understands, like Milton or Sartre, that Hell is not a philosophical given but, rather, an evolving state of understanding and reaction to the world around you. Descriptions of Hell in art history have been made almost exclusively by men, as if the bearer of such bad news delivered by the likes of Bosch, Brueghel or Blake could only be male. The Hell that Brown conjures in Harlot (2025) deliberately inveighs against such phallocentric renditions, usually delivered in microscopic detail by an army of tiny protagonists each experiencing one death more excruciating or fantastical than the other.

Of course, Harlot already signals that the essence (if not the subject) of this painting is a prostitute and, perhaps, Brown is thinking specifically about Babylon – the great harlot – who was punished for her ‘sins’ in Revelations 17 and 18. Rather than unveil an opera of death peppered with outlandish monsters, Brown peers inside the matrix of Hell which, here, alludes to the physicality and biology of a woman. It is as if she has cut open the belly of Eve or Babylon or Mary Magdalene and gathered their entrails, readying to throw them in to the fire of Hell. Brown’s marks are somewhat softer in this composition, with less emphasis on an inquisitive delineation and any concomitant penetration of ground. Rather here the whole surface heaves with a heavy angst, pressed by the largo of her mark making which, in turn, transforms the usual panoramic appreciation of her ‘scapes (and, by extension, the blueprint for the stage upon which such hellish accounts are ordinarily relayed by men) into an atomic space that, in its amplification, serves the ultimate confession of Hell; one where the female body and the intimacy she both desires and provides becomes an evisceration both corporeal and psychological. The result is a space – more than a place or a protagonist – that resides between beauty and destruction: the artist’s most poignant characterisation of Hell.

IV: THE COLOUR OF HELL

“I’ll just take white, and I’ll take cadmium red medium, which is my favourite colour, and mix it up and make a pink. That mess of pink makes me want to paint.” (Philip Guston)

Given the consistency of her palette, it is worth diving a little deeper into Brown’s choices of colours and the signification such chroma offers when immersing yourself in her painted universe. Pinks – and the numerous shades and hues that build up that colour’s individual spectrum – are the most prominent tones in Brown’s work.

Lauren Brown, Figure that never forms, 2025, Oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm (31 1/2 x 23 5/8 in)

Lauren Brown, Figure that never forms, 2025, Oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm (31 1/2 x 23 5/8 in)

The colour is usually associated with femininity, innocence and romance, so that Brown’s employment of the colour – thrown into pits of visual combat with much darker, haunting tones – is telling. Her transformation of the colour’s usual gentle bloom – coercing it to confront and then convey a space where substance (and thus meaning) deliquesces into blurs and sullies of horror – is most powerful. The rosy light that illuminates playfulness or compassion now offers a darker take. One sees this very clearly in Brown’s Figure that never forms (2025): a scaffold of marks that tries to maintain the gravity of its ground, but which is ripped apart by Brown’s muscular brushwork – all of which is executed in pinks. Pink now becomes the arbiter of pain and suffering; the destroyer of worlds in that Brown employs it to literally consume any sense of structure or design. Pink – that common signifier of flesh – now, ironically, is used to describe a surface flayed or unpeeled.

Lauren Brown, Sulphur, 2025, Oil on canvas, 170 x 150 cm (66 7/8 x 59 in)

Lauren Brown, Sulphur, 2025, Oil on canvas, 170 x 150 cm (66 7/8 x 59 in)

Working in concert with Brown’s medley of lilac, purple and pink tones are several orange hues that the artist usually employs to kick off the beginning of her ground. Sulphur (2025) throws its viewer directly into the fire and brimstone of Hell, and whilst several pink moments serve to push out of the pictorial plane a complex structure that seems mechanical or even robotic, it is Brown’s long licks of umber, amber, orange and gold that dominate the composition, creating a fire in the sky that vaporizes all that dare touch it. Where pink is soft and feminine, orange often signifies arrogance or danger so that, in Sulphur, Brown’s amphitheatre is already tarnished with the sinful behaviour Hell craves. Yet, as with pink, orange does not necessarily activate Brown’s surface in such a manner; rather, these tones offer a light at the end of the tunnel we must all climb through to gain a purchase on Brown’s paintings. A light that should offer hope and clarity but which, instead, merely wafts the stench of crime and punishment that perfumes Hell.

Brown has turned to several artists in deliberately employing both these colours and using them in a dynamic interplay between forces of light and dark(ness). Guston’s ‘mess of pink’ immediately comes to mind, with Brown extracting some of the garish quality of Guston’s choice of colour as well as the almost infantile execution of that paint with his zero-fucks-to-give brush. However, Brown has also looked at the satiny swishes of pink – as fragile as they are beautiful, as luxurious as they are commanding – one finds in Renaissance painters such as Titian or Parmigianino. She has turned to Ribera and, of course, Goya for inspiration in managing her recounter between tones both light and dark and, indeed, even a cursory glance over Brown’s new body of work sees her imbue her darkness with Goya’s monsters and allow the light that, on occasion, blanches it purr with consideration and reason.

V: OUR STATE OF TENSION

“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.” (D.W. Winnicott)

Lauren Brown’s paintings exist in a perpetual state of tension. Forms twist, as both shapes and cyphers; lines flick(er) in and out of planes of colour – both evanescent and saturated - encouraging a collision then dissipation of shape and chroma and a surface that never starts or ends but rather sits on the edge of some primordial coalescence, shedding its dark light on our tested experience. In Brown’s unsettled pictorial universe, one soon understands that knowledge and certainty are subsumed by inquiry and experimentation with this thrust nurturing a surface as gooey and inchoate as it is angry and alive.

Lauren Brown, Pope, 2025, Oil on canvas, 200 x 170 cm (78 3/4 x 66 7/8 in)

Lauren Brown, Pope, 2025, Oil on canvas, 200 x 170 cm (78 3/4 x 66 7/8 in)

Pope (2025) is a painting that perfectly sums up the state of unease that fizzes through Brown’s work and, indeed, our own lives. Her stunning knit of line and plane, pulsating with morphological and chimerical possibility, serves to build up a composition that feels unhinged, yet which is anything but. It is the confidence and assertion she displays in creating these architectonic grounds that allows her to roam around such citadels or temples, hiding deep inside the shrine waiting for the apocalypse to pass so she – we – can rebuild in its aftermath. ‘Pope’ could refer to the head of the Catholic Church; it could also make a connection with the great English poet of the Enlightenment period, Alexander Pope. One fixed in the past; the other looking forward; one draped in blind faith; the other alert with a questioning empiricism. Either way, such elasticity of index – be that human or divine (to paraphrase the poet) – continues to feed the visual ambiguity that Brown seeks to excavate from her surfaces. A polysemy that lets marks ebb in and out of characterisation (without ever losing their agency); that throws the light of what is known into the caliginosity of the unknown; that empowers a painted surface which, like some sinewy tesseract of becoming, throws pillars of being into jeopardy and has form flourish from its fix into floods of promise: primal, pulchritudinous and putrid.

Matt Carey-Williams

Sandy Lane, Wiltshire

20 – 25 March, 2025