As their eyes are almost always looking away from both the viewer and the other men in the scene, they seem to long for something outside the frame. If not alone—and often they appear in pairs or groups—the figures playfully and wistfully wrap around and caress one another with enormous, unwieldy hands.
The forlorn figures in William Brickel’s paintings brood in claustrophobic contortions. Their inner lives seem to be as convoluted as their poses, as ambivalent as their mien. As their eyes are almost always looking away from both the viewer and the other men in the scene, they seem to long for something outside the frame. If not alone—and often they appear in pairs or groups—the figures playfully and wistfully wrap around and caress one another with enormous, unwieldy hands.
“If the hands are wrong,” Brickel has said, “then the whole painting doesn’t work.” His fixation on hands stems from their ability to “evoke empathy.” Through touch, we understand and are understood. Yet the pictured relations are insistently contradictory, confounding not only to viewers but to the figures themselves as well.
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