Gallery artist Michael Brophy was featured in a recent newletter from Visual Art Source. The article, written by Matthew Kangas, reviews Michael Brophy's latest exhibition with the gallery, Infandous.
"Michael Brophy, "Infandous" by Matthew Kangas 
Russo Lee Gallery, Portland, Oregon | Continuing through November 1, 2025
The exhibit title, “Infandous,” is an Old English word that means “too odious to be expressed" or "unspeakable; nefarious,” which Michael Brophy happened on to describe the overall imagery of his current exhibition. He also wrote a 26-word, haiku-like poem that accompanied the press release. Neither title nor poem is necessary to appreciate the art.
Long known as a painter of landscapes who delves deeply into ecological perils, Brophy’s new work is his most alarming yet, as well as his most beautiful. Each painting has a single word at its base, like a page from an old-fashioned explanatory text book. Half of them are quite large (up to 114 by 132 inches) and half are very small (18 by 22 inches), and all contain a mixture of imagery that illustrates impending ecological disasters of one sort or another. Their collective impact is emotionally powerful, yet strangely attractive. “Odious and unspeakable” content is expressed in beautiful painterly brushstrokes and often quick sketchy passages.
Art that is so topical and engaged with current social issues runs the risk of becoming dated once the momentary crisis passes. With Brophy, the crisis of the endangered environment not only has not passed, it has increased to alarming dimensions. Another Portland artist, Mark Rothko, called for an art that was “tragic and timeless.” Indeed, Brophy’s depictions of, for example, the aftermath of timber clear-cutting, decayed virgin forests, industrial wastelands, and, this time around, the renewed threat of nuclear proliferation, have become both tragic and timeless in the face of a very real crisis. They constitute a powerful vision of both social and political circumstances, as well as of the perils facing the natural world.
To that end, in his large paintings Brophy captures multiple time elements of ongoing disasters by sectioning each painting vertically. At the side of one painting, “Infandous: Boundary” (all paintings are 2025), a verdant forest appears. At the other side, frantic monochrome sketches of flattened wooded areas with meandering rivers and darkened sky seem to have been drawn in under the duress of further cataclysm: there isn’t time to paint in a full picture. A thick tree trunk divides the two sides, acting as both dividing line and bulwark. The effect here, as in several other paintings, is both chilling and exhilarating.
Brophy has managed to compress his signs of danger into compositions that allow us plenty of breathing space to take in the whole scenario. With their frequently divided vertical panels, other “Infandous” paintings (“I,” “II,” “Struck,” and “Fire”) chronicle a wide range of manmade problems, each recording a given setback or impending chaos while providing a grandeur of both scale and alarm. Their effect alludes to a long history of ambitious American landscape painting that embraced the “manifest destiny” of privileged settlement and exploitation that set in motion the whole process of unraveling and decay over 150 years ago.
For an artist so prolific over a lengthy career, Brophy has been a slippery topic for curators and critics. For example, his 2005 Tacoma Art Museum retrospective focused on what was titled the “Romantic Vision of Michael Brophy.” Twenty years later, Brophy has retained the vocabulary of the sublime associated with Romantic painting and poetry, but has turned it horrific by introducing nuclear bombs at a time when nuclear proliferation has become a more troubling issue than ever. Certain paintings, like “Infandous II,” “Infandous: Hymn,” and “Infandous: Strive,” have tiny mushroom clouds at their top or, in the latter, at its center.
In this sense, two other aspects of the 65-year-old Portland native emerge. First there is the prophetic feeling of apocalypse throughout the new work. Though they may be small, the mushroom clouds’ positioning at the top of each picture epitomizes the subtlety with which the artist often conveys his warnings. The second quality that makes his frightening images bearable is their lush, painterly execution and relatively restrained treatment of content. We do not immediately apprehend the undertow of ruin, but spending time with each work reveals the powerful presence of that undertow. “Infandous: Mute,” with its faltering, shredded American flag, operates symbolically with well-determined visual coding to make its point."