Excerpt from curator’s essay in the catalogue for the exhibition “The Fitting Room” at Vogt Gallery, New York, in 2011
Brody is also a painter seen to be to “fitting room” into his dense, complex, evolving-before-our-eyes-as-we-watch pictorial space. In his case, it is sometimes as if rooms are literally slotted into holes or lesions within his vast confabulations of urban structure. Brody’s imagery juggles long and close views, teasing contrastive associations in which opposite extremes of scale seem possible: we might be looking at a dense cellular structure, a rusty machine, or the panorama of a futuristic but at the same time decaying city. He is an artist of obsessive intensity, working in closely hatched mark making akin to what I have called, only half-disparagingly, a tendency among artists of his milieu towards “fuss and fiddle.” In Brody’s aesthetic, however, the quirks of handwriting are offset by sublime sensations of space. He offers a fusion of grandeur and doubt that recalls Cézanne.
He generates painterly webs of involved, accumulating marks that have the energy of algorithmic patterns and yet are entirely intuitive and improvisatory. John Yau has proposed a cartesian division of facture and thought in relation to his work. “Brody creates a dialogue between body (the mark it makes) and mind (whatever layers and additions are made to what preceded it), the focus of which is the creation of uninhabited spaces where one’s imagination can find solace despite their apocalyptic references.”