smoke the moon is thrilled to be opening the new year with Live On Air, a debut presentation of paintings by Zac Brenner. Brenner, who was born and raised in Santa Fe, is a singular artist. His paintings will be presented throughout the main gallery space. Live On Air is a deep dive into a body of work that Brenner has been creating for the last two years. The paintings in this show are dense without being heavy: the product of deep listening and an intuitive relationship to the creative process. Brenner’s work lays form and feeling to a universe that sits right beside or under this one. His paintings tap into the beauty and strangeness of the overlooked object or memory. 

Brenner has a fully realized style: though each of his paintings feels distinct, they read as snapshots of a mythic, intimately absurd universe. Brenner paints with a loose but focused hand. He often begins and comes back to paintings; an evolving relationship with his work is present throughout all his finished paintings. Always colorful and varying in tone and texture, Brenner’s paintings are doorways into quotidian mystery. He makes work with a meditative intention while remaining tuned towards the vitality of the work, letting it stay true to its own unpredictable nature. 

Throughout this show, figuration and the surreal intermingle. Brenner’s scenes emerge from both inside and outside his psyche. His imagery comes both from moments of experiencing the world, as well as from scenes or figures that come to him from some deeper place. His paintings are often iterative—figures and faces meld into one another and between forms, presiding over scenes like trippy modern angels or omniscient narrators. Perspective collapses onto itself. Portraits of friends vibrate with a devotion to one’s small things and still lives of messy desks are anything but still. Creatures and animals morph to become guardians of another plane. His work echoes the strangeness of the world once one drops into its ephemeral splendor. Brenner is painting a story without an ending but with many exits.

This show is unafraid of saying what and who it is in dialogue with—scenes and people who have influenced Brenner’s life intermingle with mischievous uncanny valleys. Life and painting, and further, the life a painting contains, emerge in this show with a wise promise: all is revealed if one stays devoted to curiosity. Live On Air is an ode to the beauty of being in process, to a real love of painting, and to the pleasures of paying attention.