Takes & Outtakes, Eugene Brodsky’s fourth solo exhibition at Sears-Peyton’s Chelsea gallery, celebrates artistic materials and processes in all their fertile turns and returns. Inspired by the open-ended processes of Robert Rauschenberg, who scoured his personal and urban landscapes to create his assemblages, and of Barry Le Va, whose “distributions” reconceived his sculptural leftovers as the artwork itself, Brodsky includes both carefully prepared pieces developed with laser precision and the poignant reconstructed remnants of that production. The resulting Apollonian “takes” and the mischievous “outtakes” sing a visual call and response to each other.

Brodsky views the play of planning and freedom in these works as distillations of his creative imperative as an artist. “It's my job to subvert a demonstration of skill in my own work if I want to keep moving,” he says. “To fight taste and habit is what I find exhilarating about making art.”

Like characters in a series of novels whose circumstances change, Brodsky’s shapes enact colorful dramas as they respond to new pictorial circumstances across different artworks. Using cutting and silkscreening processes applied to lush silk grounds, the hard graphic edges of one shape often appears as a reversed form in another. In Seated Man (2017), a cyan figurative shape appliquéd onto a dusty gray ground allows a gray divot to peer through, as an ochre rectangle occupies the lower right corner. In W2 F3 (2017), the ochre rectangle and the figure with its omission recur, yet their positions have now exchanged, their orientations inverted. Taken together, Brodsky’s “takes” and “outtakes” bespeak the studio’s procedural experiments and the thrill of improvisation.