BRIELL GIANCOLA

ARTIST STATEMENT
My work approaches painting as a material and bodily event shaped by conditions of pressure, resistance, and instability. Rather than composing fixed images, I construct situations in which marks emerge through negotiation with time, volatility, and material behavior. The paintings do not represent the body but behave like one, fluctuating between exposure and withdrawal, control and collapse, containment and spill. Forms press against implied boundaries, pool, bleed, and accumulate, producing structures that feel both deliberate and on the verge of release.

Influenced by theories of abjection, I am interested in moments where boundaries break down and meaning becomes unstable. As I’ve come to learn through my ongoing studio research, the abject is not an object but a condition; one that disrupts identity while simultaneously helping to define it. I am drawn to this paradox: the way disgust, desire, and curiosity coexist when we encounter something that resists categorization. Recent reading, including Girls Play Dead by Jen Percy, has deepened this inquiry, particularly in relation to tonic immobility and self-preservation as forms of embodied resistance. These ideas inform how I approach the painting as a site where vulnerability, refusal, and survival are materially enacted.

Material is central to this process. I use alcohol inks on non-absorbent Yupo and retroreflective surfaces that refuse to fully receive the mark. The ink slips, pools, stains, and reactivates, meaning that each new gesture has the potential to erase or destabilize what came before. I work within the rapid evaporation of the ink, where time is compressed and decisions must be made quickly, often without the possibility of correction. This creates a constant negotiation with the brink of the painting’s collapse. As quickly as an image can form, it can disappear.

This condition of risk is not incidental but necessary. In a broader cultural context shaped by optimization, speed, and frictionless consumption, I am interested in what it means to work against ease. Many materials would allow for greater control and stability, but I choose those that introduce difficulty and unpredictability. The paintings insist on friction—both in their making and in their reception. They resist quick legibility and deny resolution, requiring the viewer to slow down and remain within a state of uncertainty.

My approach to abstraction is informed by artists who variously engage structure, gesture, and instability, including Jadé Fadojutimi, Charline von Heyl, Katherine Bradford, Sol LeWitt, and Soleé Darrell. From these practices, I draw a range of strategies—from conceptual systems to gestural excess—but push them toward states of sustained pressure, where structure is not removed but continually tested and destabilized.

I think of this work as abstraction under pressure. Pressure operates materially, through the volatility of the medium, but also conceptually, in relation to the body and to contemporary image culture. The surfaces I use often evoke screens (luminous, reflective, and seductive), but they fail to function as such. Instead of delivering clear information, they interrupt and deflect it. In this way, the paintings act as counter-screens, resisting the constant flow and accessibility of digital images.

At the same time, the work is informed by a feminist understanding of the body as a site of tension, conflict, vulnerability, and resistance. I am interested in how structures of power are registered physically and psychologically, and how self-preservation can function as a form of refusal. The paintings hold these contradictions: they are at once assertive and fragile, aggressive and withholding. Central forms are often built and destabilized, withheld or overfilled, producing spaces that feel bodily without becoming representational.

Ultimately, the work does not resolve these tensions but sustains them. The surface becomes a record of decisions made under constraint, where gesture, color, and time remain visible as competing forces. Meaning is not delivered but negotiated, and often withheld. In this way, the painting performs a defense mechanism and becomes a site of resistance, one that challenges expectations of clarity, immediacy, and control, and instead insists on an embodied, durational encounter.

GRANTS & AWARDS

2025

Graduate Student Senate Research Award, Kent State University, Kent, OH

2024

Illuminate the Arts Grant, Creative Philadelphia, PA

2024
The Denis Diderot Grant and the Emerging Artist Grant at Chateau Orquvevaux International Artist Residency, France

LECTURES

2023

Visiting Artist Lecture at the University of New England

RESIDENCIES & RESEARCH

2024
Selected Artist in Residence, Chateau d’Orquevaux International Artist Residency, Orquevaux, France

2018

Guest Critic for The Yards, Collaborative Residency, The Yards, Rochester, NY

2017

Selected Artist in Residence, Pinea Linea de Costa, Rota, Spain

2016

Solo Professional Development Research, Cuba

COLLECTIONS
Chateau d’Orquevaux International Artist Permanent Collection at Galerie Diderot Chateau Orquevaux, France

EDUCATION

2027

Projected Graduation Kent State University MFA in Visual Art, Painting Concentration 

2016

Alfred University, New York State College of Ceramics (BFA)

PUBLICATIONS

2022

How the crops feel, Midnight, Issue 3, Lilac Magazine, Rochester, NY

1:1, First Love, Issue 2, Lilac Magazine, Rochester, NY

2020

Buffalo Spree Magazine, Buffalo, NY

2016

ArtHousePress, Art Magazine, Issue one, Rochester, NY