BRETT CHARLES SEILER
Name: Brett Charles Seiler
Age: 27
Birthplace: Harare, Zimbabwe
Home: Cape Town, South Africa
Discipline: Painting
Girls Break Up With Girls All The Time
What is the story behind your work?
I’m not sure where to begin! I guess it has always been a story of coming out, being queer, and questioning masculinity. My practice has always been influenced by what was happening at the time, so my work was a way of understanding myself and answering questions about queerness. A turning point was when I quit my shitty retail job and became a full-time artist - I think that is when my paintings became evolved and focused.
Which topics does your work focus on?
There’s a lot: queerness, privacy, autobiography, masculinity, sexuality. I think they all combine together to create a story.
Who are the characters in your work?
Many figures are men, but a lot of them can also be quite androgynous and mythic. I’ve been painting scenes of men in apartments, lounging around - it’s like a private view into their lives. There is often a dynamic between the figures in the paintings: sometimes one is clothed and the other one is not, or one is standing up and the other one is sitting on the floor. I think this speaks to some sort of ‘happening’ or ‘conversation’ between masculinity and sexuality. I don’t find the paintings to be sexual, I find them to be more romantic and sensitive. There is a lot of care and consideration in the work I make between the figures, the furniture, the floors and the frames.
How do you define your artistic search and practice in three words?
A bit gay.
What poetry is your work about?
There is a lot of text-based work in my paintings, which may be the poetry of my work. There is often sentences or poetic lines such as, ‘Like Pride Month You Always Cum and Go’ and ‘When Everyone Has With One Another, I Will Still Be Dancing In The Gay Bar Wishing The DJ Never Left’. I think that defines the existential queer loneliness we sometimes experience. The text-based works are really dry and sad and silly and funny, which I think makes it a bit camp.
Which materials do you use and what do you want to say with them?
I work with bitumen and roof paint, materials often used to build furniture and for homemaking. I started to use these construction-based materials viewed as hyper-masculine to comment on queering that space. I think it’s a metaphor or a way of subverting ‘man’s work’. I build a lot of the frames myself - they have this DIY aesthetic with so many screws and splits between them that it feels like they could break at any point. The works are sensitive both in terms of the subjects that I’m painting and their physical nature.
What do you want to achieve?
I don’t really have any goals in mind when I paint, but I do wish my art would give people an insight. I hope that my paintings also educate and normalise the queer experience. A lot of paintings that were taught to me [in the past] were heteronormative, so one of the goals would be to make space for queer romanticism to exist.
Gay For God