Catalogue Essay
The pleasure of paint by Will Mackinnon
What does it mean to be choosing to make a painting now? In 2026 after all these years painting has become urgent again. Made by one person from woe to go, by hand in a generative process out of raw materials, something emerges from human and primordial materials in a dance, a struggle to make as old as man. It is the antithesis of cannibalising, averaging so called “artificial intelligence”. Painting has the elastic ability to catch the traces of consciousness….which is still the big mystery. Bugger going to Mars, we still don’t understand where our thoughts come from and what we might do next …these paintings are a record of the greatest mystery, a map of what is going on between our ears.
Made in a way that belies the hand, I find these paintings so illusive and alluring as I wonder how the fuck did Brett make them? Impossible marks that seem smeared or is it sanded?? Or are those strips printed by frottage like Max Earnst? They are redolent with knowledge of the greats of the modern canon, very European to my eye but very much Brett’s own language and materials, which is a huge achievement in a hyper competitive world where the low hanging fruit was plucked long ago.
I have had the good fortune to have a front row seat watching Brett’s hard-earned artistic evolution. After a chance meeting we reconnected over two decades ago in Berlin of all places. In hindsight, it is emblematic; two ambitious and adventurous want-to-be artists sitting on the steps outside the Hamburger Banhoff, so close to what we wanted but so so far! I was meant to leave the next day , after being terribly lost and lonely in this foreign city, but bouyed by this encounter I asked if I could flop on his floor for a couple of days and that was the beginning of a very close friendship.
We have orbited each other in Europe and Australia and shared in each others’ feasts and famines of the Art world.
I have seen first hand Brett’s phenomenal success in Europe over the last decade. I am so pleased to see his work here in Melbourne…often the home audience is the toughest to crack.
On close examination of Weir’s latest paintings, I experience a cycling pleasure and frustration in my mind as my eyes eat up this bold series … is that a figure on on a shore?
109 and 105 have the qualities of a film being developed in a darkroom, an image emerging out of the chemical bath, simultaneously appearing and disappearing.
078 is an extraordinary painting. My mind finds a landscape, a hill reflecting in a lake or sea. I wonder if Brett is looking to find something, a diamond in the rough as he excavates these hard surfaces. The extreme pressure he puts himself under and the materials sometimes produce rare diamonds. There are some absolutely mind blowing passages of paint, impossible combinations and delicious accidents that emerge out of collisions, heavy scraping, chemical blooms and light flares as the paint floats from cans held in both hands to rest like snow on the metal.
In 80 erasure asserts the metallic ground, rupturing any image my mind creates. These areas of calm are a place for the eye to rest and linger longer before entering the fray again. They are from a different time, repose and certainly a different tempo and physicality of the creative destruction that charges this inimitable body of work.
Allusions of images aside, this is a show where the act of painting is the subject, and Weir continues to find fresh ground that makes me want to run back to the studio.
William MacKinnon | February 2026
Cinder (2026) is Weir’s Premiere exhibition with Jacob Hoerner Galleries.