smoke the moon presents Sketches for Dawn, a solo presentation of new work by Will Bruno (Santa Fe, NM). Bruno’s work is inveterately rooted in the northern New Mexico region where he lives, works, and wanders. His paintings meld plein air excursions with a studio practice in dialogue with his long-standing comic series Sick Earth Catalog. What emerge are landscapes populated with figures and objects both real and imagined. Sketches for Dawn is a sprawling, intricately woven display of Bruno’s persistent attention toward the spirit of a small new world inside the old.  

Bruno paints a land that has always been its own ecstasis: a realm outside oneself. His paintings transmute the possibilities of the larger and longer view. Sketches for Dawn implies a circularity in its most nascent form: a sketch for the coming sun, the coming day. Inside Bruno’s work there is a constant reminder of the way the individual is dwarfed in and by nature. He channels this magnitude through a spiritual relationship to landscape painting that pushes back against categorization. A landscape becomes a fable or an accumulation of horizons. These are paintings that are on their way somewhere, that are making a place to become new again in the drenched, hazy tones of the dawn. Bruno paints the land as it has always been: wild, and slightly beyond our grasp. His work luxuriates in a third space between knowing and seeing.

Will Bruno makes paintings that are a balm for a world simultaneously depleted of symbols and overrun with images. Ecstatic and uneasy figures, hour watchers, tricksters, glyphs and heavenly markers float through his scenes. Bruno’s faces of this world and another act as psychopomps: escorts through a surreal mist and constantly opening sky. Allegorical frames and folk powers gambol through ancient sites. These scenic interrupters gesture toward a general assembly of mythic sociality. They praise the wanderers, the ones that hold the knowledge of the day and night.

While making Sketches for Dawn, Bruno worked simultaneously to tune toward the larger impulse and conversation between the paintings. Each painting could then become a mark of its own within the larger grid, the painter’s task to trust in the growing chorus. Bruno’s visual meditations do not search for peace or absolution but for communion with a greater and more mundane beauty. The energetic devotion to brush and canvas come through his work: paint feels innately connected to hand, surface and place. A formal curiosity and devotion to study live in companionship inside his work. Reflexive and meticulous, Bruno paints with a visionary particularity. Both pensive and intuitive, his work layers a landscape that can hold fine, detailed scenes and brushstrokes freed from restraint in the same breath. 

Throughout Sketches for Dawn, Will Bruno presents a collision of eccentricities of an earth with its axis turned askance. The sun that sets in multiples may rise solitary. Heavens collide, the sky grows ever-larger. Bruno’s work lays scene to a morphological globality: things happen in the round both historically and spiritually. Words reduced to letters still hold an unknown language. A globe becomes its own skeleton, then becomes an orb of another sort of light. A strange wavering line of hope appears, in spite and through it all.