I Would Like To Lose It All With You - Brett Seiler

Words: Dan Charles

The phrase “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” originates from the Book of Common Prayer and is often used in funeral rites to symbolise the return of the body to the earth and the hope of resurrection.

An ashtray that is overcrowded with cigarette butts is an unsightly thing for many people, particularly those who don’t smoke. I am an avid smoker and so the sight does not perturb me all that much. In fact, there is a kind of beauty that can be gleamed from it. One of the things that I most love to do is to sit and smoke with my friend Shannon, particularly during the get-togethers that she and her fiancé Mia will often host at their house where our closest friends will cluster around a table and just sit and talk long into the night. By the end of the night, there will be a few dirty dishes from the meal that Mia cooked, a few empty bottles of whatever everyone was drinking and a mountain of ash, Ventti filters and Winston Blue butts between Shannon and I - a small monument to the time shared between us. The time that had passed.

When I visited his studio at the end of February, the artist Brett Seiler said that it was fine to ash my cigarette on the floor. Over the last few months, Brett has hosted many of his friends inside his studio. During their visits, they would chat, drink beer, play chess and probably also ash on the floor if they smoked cigarettes. Eventually, Brett would loosely set them up in a pose and then take their picture. Once they were gone, he would use their picture as a reference for a portrait that he would paint to form a part of his next exhibition. At one point, this studio was engulfed in a deluge of cardboard, tins of paint and stacks upon stacks of photocopied images of the people that Brett loves that would be immortalised in the canon of his life’s work of exploring feelings of longing and intimacy through his paintings. During my visit, the space was mostly empty. All the paintings were finished and hanging in the prestigious Everard Read Gallery in Cape Town. All that was left in the studio was a few photocopied images still stuck to the mirror, patches of the bitumen that Brett uses as paint licked between messages written on the wall by Brett’s boyfriend and a few paintings in the corner that had been wrapped up and awaiting their delivery to Germany where Brett will also be relocating to soon after this point. Brett and I ashed our cigarettes on the floor, contributing to the constellation of the speckled remnants of cardboard and bitumen used in his painting — the dwindling debris of memory contained within the space that had served its purpose.

At the heart of Brett’s latest exhibition - I Would Like to Lose It All with You - lies a profound exploration of memory. There is an autobiographical quality to the work, with the paintings acting as a repository for memories, a way to preserve and give form to the ephemeral moments that shape our lives. Brett’s lovers, friends and muses all find their way into the canvases of his portraits, yet the paintings resist straightforward representation as the subjects often fade into the background of the corners of Brett’s studio, becoming characters in a larger narrative. The paintings suggest that memory is not simply about accurately recalling the past, but about the stories we construct and the meanings we ascribe to our experiences. In this way, the act of painting becomes a means of wrestling with the complexities of memory - not just preserving the past, but reimagining it, imbuing it with new layers of significance.

For Brett, the paintings serve as a means of grappling with the slippery nature of recollection, the way memories can feel like they are "slipping away" even as we hold onto them. His previous exhibition, "So Many Pictures, Several Memories," also spoke to this duality - the abundance of memories juxtaposed with the sense that they are fading from our grasp. 

“They're kind of fleeting,” says Brett of the nature of his collection of portraits. “They kind of like passing moments. They're not like, they're not done, they're unfinished in a way. So it's like very much capturing moments and ideas and like hoping that they stick some way. I mean, if you look at them, like the frames are a little bit wonky, and the structures are kind of falling apart. Like there's no sense of me lying about how they're made. I'm being completely honest. This thing can fall apart. And I like that. I like this kind of fragility and how it makes the work feel more tender.”

Bitumen - which is one of the primary mediums that Brett uses in his works in lieu of more conventional paints - is a hardy building material that is often used in the construction of roads or roofing or waterproofing. But as the material ages and undergoes the process of oxidation becomes very brittle and fragile, which shows us that even the sturdiest facets of our foundations are susceptible to the ravaging of time’s passing. And I know that much of what I have written about so far has been the fleeting of moments and how they are dissolved into the solvency of memory but it is the significance that memory holds within the LGBTQIA+ community as it is a community whose existence and legacy has been threatened with attempts at erasure for generations. I’m talking about the history of queerness within ancient cultures erased by colonialism; I’m talking about the droves of gay men who died during the AIDS crisis due to the neglect of their governments; I’m talking about the crimination of homosexuality implanted by the constitutions of country’s such as Zimbabwe where Brett Seiler, a gay man, grew up; I’m talking about the US government attempting to refute the rights of transgender people within their constitution today; I’m talking about the closure of life-saving sexual health clinics across South Africa due to America’s withdrawal of 

USAID funding; I’m talking about the murder of Muhsin Hendricks, the first gay imam, who was shot dead in Gqeberha during the month of Brett Seiler’s exhibition.

The word “apocalypse” comes to mind because that’s what it feels like. But the apocalypse does not mean the end. The word is derived from the Greek word “apokalypsis” which means “to reveal” which might explain why the Book of Genesis, the Bible’s account of the creation of the world, also tells the story of an apocalyptic flood. As a revelation of the necessity of faith, Noah followed God’s instructions to build a raft that would endure flood and, as written in Genesis 6:14, he was instructed to line the ark with bitumen. 

If there is anything that has been revealed at the end of all these apocalypses that have been endured, it is that we need to rely on each other to keep ourselves and our memories alive. There is no one telling us how to build an ark to survive and so we must figure out how to build our own. Brett, like Noah, uses bitumen. Whatever method you choose, I hope that you can shelter all the people you love within a vessel that can withstand the magnitude of any apocalypse that you might face. I hope that it is a space where everyone can chat, drink beer, play chess and ash on the floor if they smoked cigarettes. Once the floods subside, a rainbow will always await us.

@brettseiler