Colin Brant’s Phantom Ship
Wells Chandler July 13. 2025
Installation view of Phantom Ship at Europa, New York, New York (courtesy of the artist and Europa)
In Phantom Ship, Colin Brant explores the thresholds between geology and mythology, perception and reality, time and timelessness. Drawing on the natural and cultural narratives of Crater Lake Oregon, his paintings are acts of homage and inquiry, meditations on the layered mysteries of place and presence.
Brant’s recent paintings reflect the physical forms of Crater Lake, while immersing the viewer in its underlying vitality. His practice cultivates direct perception, attuning to an expansive and luminous quality of being. Color and light emerge as central forces. Light moves through compositions as a field of quiet intensity. Guided by a contemplative rhythm, his palette is subtle, his chromatic shifts are measured. The concept of the Rainbow Body in Tibetan Buddhism, where an enlightened being transforms into pure light, offers a powerful lens for Brant’s kaleidoscopic vistas. Rainbows appear as an ethereal presence, evoking transformation, clarity, and dissolution into spacious awareness. These paintings suggest a world on the verge of radiance.
Installation view of Phantom Ship at Europa, New York, New York (courtesy of the artist and Europa)
Brant’s paintings hold presence. They shift through soft tonalities and atmospheric transitions, evoking the Buddhist tantric concept of the subtle body, an energetic architecture alive, within, and around form. His work pulses with interiority, echoing the channels and winds of the human body, residing in the felt form of place. Brant’s practice aligns with the Vajrayāna Buddhist visualization of the yidam, a deity chosen for meditative identification and transformation, representing one’s own deepest potential. In this exchange, the yogi merges with the archetype through identification, reshaping the subtle body. The geologies in Brant’s work, quietly offer themselves to this same gesture. They hold still not as an object of worship, but as a mirror reflecting the nature of mind back to itself.
Installation view of Phantom Ship at Europa, New York, New York (courtesy of the artist and Europa)
A spectral horse in several works conjures lungta, the Tibetan wind horse symbolizing stamina, harmony, and spiritual momentum. This mythical figure unites outer elements with inner strength and consciousness, extending as an invitation into energetic alignment.
Brant’s paintings recalibrate the senses. They are open fields, in the deepest sense, an offering to see things uncompromised. At the core of non-duality is the recognition that form and emptiness are not opposites, but interpenetrating truths. This principle enshrined in the Heart Sutra’s famous dictum “form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” can be palpably felt in Brant’s approach to image making. An understanding that the split between original and copy is itself illusory, what we see in Brant’s paintings is not a doubling, but a unity briefly shimmering into perception.
Installation view of Phantom Ship at Europa, New York, New York (courtesy of the artist and Europa)
Mircea Eliade’s concept of sacred time, a cyclical, mythic present, frames Brant’s work as a continuous ritual of return. Resting within the simultaneity of compressed time nestled within the current moment, his slow brushwork and soft edges evoke recurrence. In this stillness, we are invited to pause and inhabit the space of the painting, just as one might enter a mandala or a shrine. Installed as a whole, the paintings and ceramic sculpture in Phantom Ship become a site of ritual return, a place where perception itself is sanctified.
Brant’s paintings position awareness itself as the primary subject. They provide room to slow down and reinhabit our center. They are the profound inseparability of consciousness with the natural world. In this way, his work is not an image of the real, but a prism of it. And in this nondual reflection, we may catch a glimpse of the reality of ourselves that is still, spacious, and fully alive.
Colin Brant: Phantom Ship at Europa (125 Division Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY ) through July 13.