Brenna Youngblood R. A..D…I..O

Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, 2025

Photos: Rosanna Albertini & Peter Kirby

by Rosanna Albertini

There is no explanation. Only

 “Inescapable romance, inescapable choice 

of dreams, disillusion as the last illusion,

reality as a thing seen by the mind,

Not that which is but that which is apprehended… (Wallace Stevens)

Inescapable romance, and inescapable choice of dreams through a personal time of vibrations inside the artist sharing stories all around her since she was born in the high desert, slowly adjusting to different urban places, at times captured by details, walls, doors, shoes, art made by other artists…maybe the revolving movement inside a washing machine gives the idea. 

By all that undefinable chaos was generated America the Beautiful, an artworkpainted, composed by Brenna this year, 2025. Our life in America immersed in darkness, radio as a cardboard phantom hung on a nail, holding damaged lines of news that look like they have forgotten how spacious are the skies, how purple the mountain’s majesty. Noting down, before words disappear: America, sweet America. As I write my throat is shrinking, tears grow in my eyes. 

Damned Brenna, now you are a painter, a real one. And not because you show the portrait of our time as it took shape in your mind, “unreal as real can be.” It strikes me the way you did it. The extreme care of giving shape and nuances to the gray surface, suggesting that flatness is illusion, while colors and dimness are part of the space in which we live, they are not re-presentation. The visible is not easy.

You offered a key in the title of the whole exhibition, distancing the space/ or time? between each letter, Agatha Christie style. Timing, music. It goes with Ornette Coleman’s Beauty is a Rare Thing — the breath of his soul makes the music. And your breath, modulating uncountable layers of reverberations from things you experienced, dug into your person, reemerges shouting and smiling on the canvas, pretending flowers have been blown by the wind, those commercial fabrications sweeter than the cake’s sugary coat. 

America the Beautiful spreads the beauty of your attachment to the country as it is. Your voice stronger than news. I always thought, growing up with the radio, there was a special charm in voices of people I couldn’t see, and stories I couldn’t know where they were coming from. Music was strange, enchanting, jazz before bed time. If stories were funny, it was enough. Yet, through the radio, I had the feeling there was a larger world behind the speaker, certainly bigger than my Italian village of the after war (WW2).

Blackout 2025 is one more piece of congealed music, a volume of hidden stories from which, as if by magic gone bad, black bulbs come to populate the canvas. The word BLACKOUT works like a foreground but it is not what it looks like. Each letter is carved with signs, painted as if. The artist brain vomits decoration as Picasso’s brain used to do, throwing up on the canvas all the green his eyes had absorbed.  Had maybe Brenna stretched on the gray curtain of her theater an idea of separation? As if mumbling, the world around me is snowing  ashes, I work in the dark, I work anyway; here they are, more paper laces. 

Let’s be clear: when I say you are finally a painter, I put you in the number of artists of every time who did the same you are doing: waiting for the images to take shape inside, in your mind and inside the canvas. The painted surface ends up being a screen attacked by two sides: the infinite sequence of what the eyes see in reality or in memories, and the limited scene the artist wants to introduce into that same world. The painting reveals as much as hides.

Something similar you told in the title of an older work: The Backbone of Resentment and Reassurance 28, 2007. Although mistreated by life  you removed doubts and fears. The whole story is there, contained in physical layers of colors and papers flat in their silence. Finished in the pink. An odd flower breaks the flatness, a yellow voice whispering there is too much order and quiet. Can I push? 

 At this point I don’t know if I am telling your story or mine, but the paintings themselves reassure me: year after year they explode like the craters of volcanos, they vomit feelings and stories, as your artist’s hands scratch and unfold ruining the fragility of the surface, adding lines of color, pencil, whatever, digging red ponds, dropping a few spots of sky. 

Breakfast of Champions,  2011, cries its waking up to the most delightful freedom pointing at us two wide open eyes, fried eggs on two cardboard plates. The eggs are painted. Brenna’s humor is back, no limits, toward Planet Pizza, 2025, Puppet Master (tip toe)  2025, ill, 2025 and the other brother and sister paintings of this tormented year. In all of them the big surface is dominant, they are humanscapes without land, some words and three-dimensional objects join the dance which always turns around two opposite legs: joy and pain, inseparable. The puppet master tiptoes on red, yellow, green clouds. What remains of the earth after the fire? The whole painting is implacable fire, exhilarating to the point that eyes get watery, want to stop it. Yeah, no fear of emotions

dear Brenna, 

that’s why you paint and I write. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WALLACE STEVENS, An ordinary evening in New Haven, in Collected Poetry and Prose, 1997, Penguin Putnam In, THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA