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North Shore Maine Summer Pop-Up Show with #orlandojohnson #marioshima #seiganglassig #evaschicker #ethanpettit and others https://www.instagram.com/p/Bl_wB7lhGUg/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=9c4qvsox3p04

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New Dakini Drawings by Eva Schicker

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The Hylozoica

Studies of the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg and Newtown Creek in Bushwick. These drawings will be included in New Narratives, opening March 8th at hARTslane Gallery in London.

More info here

#domino sugar factory #domino university #Bushwick #williamsburg #environment #urbanism #industrial space #art #drawing #architecture

morphopolis - new paintings by Robert Egert

Catalog essay by Laura J. Padgett

with an afterword by Ethan Pettit

Download the catalog

Oct 3 – Dec 19 – 2015

With Guest Artists Chris Fiore and Tobias Tak

Oct 3 | 7–9:30 PM | Opening Night Performance by (NOS) (a genre-fluid mental health tribute band)

Andrea Egert LSW – vocals Jack Schwartz PhD – guitar Billy Paige CpD – drums

Nov 14 | 8:00–10 PM | Movie Night with Eva Schicker and Chris Fiore

Dec 19 | 7–10 PM | Closing Party

Robert Egert • Bleeding Hearts and Distraught Souls Cannot Prevail Against Economic Systems Designed by Non-Human Constructs • oil, acrylic, tempera on canvas • 60 x 48 in • 2015 collection of Paul Little

Shapes have a memory of their own, a life of their own. The creator of a particular shape conjures a life force within the shape. Not a life force recorded by the process of painting but rather inherent in the shape itself by using line and form to bring a shape with agency into being. — RE

______________________________________________________________________

The Paintings of Robert Egert

Laura J. Padgett

Let’s have a look at this. Let’s observe closely. When we regard any kind of artwork today we can identify a plethora of references: art historical, cultural, societal, some visual. How can we contemplate what an artwork is about while at the same time see what it is? How do non-visual references influence, not what an artwork looks like, but how we see it? How do we know what something is about? How do we inform ourselves as viewers to be educated enough to know what we are comprehending when viewing an artwork?

These are questions that immediately run through my mind when I look at art, especially Robert Egert’s — and I have been looking at his work throughout his entire career. Is what we see a story, a satire, a microscopic enlargement, an analysis of DNA or patterns taken from a satellite view?

Robert Egert is an artist who thrives from the confluence of many arteries. When I met him during foundation year at Pratt Institute. I was impressed that he was born and raised in Brooklyn. Still, I don’t know if I was more impressed by his knowledge of Greek and Roman myths, I think they kind of balanced each other out.

This is important. This is important to be able to see Robert Egert’s work. He is grounded in the here and now, with a knowledge that runs through antiquity to contemporary science fiction. I don’t want to be too specific, but we can talk about rhizomes, fracking, Pan, the Loreley, Russian cinema, the Golden Age, artificial intelligence and gun control.

Robert Egert • We Need a Working Session acrylic, dyed glue, tempera on canvas • 30 x 34 in • 2015 collection of Sean Briski

Robert Egert • 26 Females• oil on canvas 28 x 36 in • 2015

All kinds of things are in his head when he paints. He thinks a lot when he works. He doesn’t make it easy on himself. The arteries that nourish his system can contradict each other, can almost cancel each other out, only to join together to strengthen each other. His work has evolved from narrative to abstract to abstract narrative. It is fluid in an overlapping viscous kind of way.

Robert Egert’s fluidity develops from a concept. This is no flimsy use of the word. At Pratt in the seventies we enjoyed a rigorous education in minimalist and conceptual art, both in theory and practice. This underlies Robert Egert’s work no matter what it looks like. His early painting moved from constructed spatial objects to new takes on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

In the early 1980s when the East Village was hip and dangerous, I saw his exhibition at Civilian Warfare. His paintings were large oil canvases, vernacular objects floated amidst a color field ground, weird perspectives generated a sense of insecure place. These works referenced the uncertainty of the times, a change in value systems, a world drifting towards an ambivalent future.

Years before artists like Neo Rauch appeared on the scene, Robert Egert was making paintings that collaged the mundane with the historical in a mix that said something about contemporary politics. Manifesting duplicity by referencing nostalgia, his work pinned down the eclecticism of the time, making images that were complex and unapologetic. Since then Robert Egert’s work has evolved to be more pondering, while reductive, dealing with questions that go beyond the contemporary. The years following the heady days of New York in the eighties took him in many directions.

Robert Egert • Exogenesis dyed glue, oil, acrylic on canvas • 28 x 36 in • 2015

Short Palindromic Repetitions oil on canvas • 24 x 30 in • 2015 collection of ethan pettit gallery

Robert Egert went on to study philosophy and sociology, founded a family, wrote for art journals and has had a good look at corporate America. Inevitably, his approach to painting has become more encompassing as he incorporates experience gained outside the hermetics of the art world. His work revolves around questions like: What is life flow? What is humanity?

The sense of searching to make humanity palpable without obvious visual cues is a quest that Robert Egert has set out upon. When we look at the shapes in his paintings we see patterns interlocking and overlays of color. Sometimes we become aware of a figure. Is it human? Put simply, Egert’s paintings can be seen as a cartography of humanity. The body is ephemeral, fleeting and appearing, drifting and separating.

Robert Egert • Quarantine Summary oil on canvas • 22 x 28 in • 2015

Tautology • pigmented glue, crayon, acrylic on canvas 24 x 28 in • 2015

The interchange of foreground and background is reminiscent of mutating cells. Yet there is also an all-encompassing skin. Is this a view from a petridish? Once again we see the flux from macro to micro, an interweaving of space in which scale becomes a nonissue.

If scale is a nonissue, we are directed to specific ideas that are important to Egert by his use of titles. Concepts that Octavia Butler developed in her trilogy “Lilith’s Brood” have occupied Egert while completing his most recent work. Writes Egert on his blog, “Her books posit interbreeding between an alien society and humans in the wake of a nuclear holocaust that essentially wipes out humans and destroys the earth. The aliens that come to save the few survivors on earth interbreed to create a new hybrid species.”

Robert Egert • We Will Be Reassembling at 5PM mixed media on canvas • 24 x 32 in • 2015 collection of Owen Berkowitz

Interbreeding, an attempt at rescuing while eliminating the original. All these thoughts connect Robert’s new work to his past work in regard to his concerns with dystopian society.

Perhaps we could call Robert Egert’s painting contemporary action painting, however not the kind of action painting by which the body directs the artist’s movements and marks made on the canvas. In Egert’s paintings the gesture is removed from the maker; it becomes a kind of meditative, autonomous painting, a kind of painting that is more related to the European tachism than American action painting.* The German “informel” artist Bernhard Schultze comes to mind with his figures wavering between human and animal forms.

And so we return to the questions one asks oneself when looking at an artwork. When does the decorative become something else? How can an artist translate the complexities of our being into paintings that are not just to be looked at? It comes down to the fact that we understand very little when we first look at an artwork. Therefore, if we see what we know, isn’t it better to know a little more? This is what makes us human. Or is it? This is the question that Robert Egert will continue to pose and continue to offer, at least partial, answers to.

* Tachism: a style of painting adopted by some French artists around the 1940s, involving dabs or splotches of color, a process of action and reaction.

Laura J. Padgett is an American-born artist, photographer, filmmaker, and educator currently based in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Since 1991, Padgett’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and her films have been screened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the House of World Cultures in Berlin, and at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. Her photography has been widely published. Since 1994, Padgett has held appointments as a lecturer on art theory and criticism at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, the Hochschule für Gestaltung at Offenbach, the Hochschule-Rhein-Main at Wiesbaden, and at Paderborn University. Padgett also writes about film, art, and aesthetic theory. Since 2000 she has been a contributing editor of the film journal Frauen und Film.

______________________________________________________________________

Behold. Morphopolis. Transfigured City. Synthetic Turn.

Ethan Pettit

Robert Egert’s career coincides with the transfiguration of New York. He and I knew each other in Williamsburg back in the 90s. We renewed our friendship when he joined the gallery three years ago, when we were located in Bushwick. In the intervening years we witnessed the morphopolis, the city that morphs with impunity. The city that swells and balloons with in-filled and up-zoned urbanity.

Robert Egert • Pendulum conté on printmaking paper • 14 x 21 in • 2012 This work is not on display in the show morphopolis

Though we may decry this event, the early Brooklyn art scene anticipated it. Unwittingly, but certainly, the Brooklyn scene anticipated the hyper-gentrified, neo-liberal accretion that marks our times. For it was a creed of the scene that things should morph. Toward the end of the last century, when “downtown” migrated to Brooklyn, the mode of artistic production began to shift as well. The postmodern art of the 1980s gave way to the unearthly formalism of Brooklyn in the 1990s.

The “immersive” environments of the warehouses as well as a recrudescent abstraction in the plastic arts were emblematic of Brooklyn art. And this was an art given to formal inventiveness, to transforming space, to unknown instead of known culture. It was a “synthetic mode of production,” as distinct from the “analytic” mode of the 1980s that was as yet more astringent, allegorical, and seated in a downtown avant-garde of a hundred years standing.

We might call it “the synthetic turn.” And in its enthusiasm for synthesis, for the breeding of forms and systems, Brooklyn art comported with the transformation of the borough, guided it even, lent to it a utopian zeal, even as the art itself struggled to stay in Brooklyn.

Hence the morphopolitan experience that gives the name to our show. Robert Egert’s career spans the whole of it. He began as an exemplary East Village painter, with the keen reflexive instincts of that school. Those instincts, analytic in nature, in time found expression in singular

shapes that are redolent of the synthoid moment of Brooklyn. His is a rare and vital passage to which people have tended to pay attention. Robert Egert is a draw, of that there is no doubt, and for that we are lucky to have him on board. He resonates with a generation that belongs to the morphopolis.

Robert Egert • Knot oil on canvas • 56 x 48 in • circa 1986 This work is not on display in the show morphopolis

November 2015 visit the exhibition homepage on our website

#painting #brooklyn #syntheticturn #robertegert #chrisfiore #bushwick #williamsburg #brooklynart

Alkemikal Soshu

May 2014

The Matador oil on canvas 30 x 59.5 in. 2012 See larger picture

Alkemikal Soshu speaks of reconciling opposites, and not just opposites but antinomies, of fundamentally irreconcilable things. His paintings are accretions of such things, compacted strata of the difficult and unwieldy, all splayed out.

The Benign Snotty and the Discovery of the God Particle oil on canvas 23.75 x 35.75 in. 2012

The paintings remind me of the great Alfred Jensen, who is very well regarded in Brooklyn, for his joinder of non-objective painting and conceptual art, of color and the occult, and for certain mapping tendencies. Soshu's work reminds me of that oblique tunneling that took place in Brooklyn more than three decades ago. The handful of painters in Greenpoint at that time were influenced by such as Jensen, and also by their socratic mentor James Harrison. It was a moment of esoteric abstraction, during the avalanche of postmodern imagery. These were the origins of Brooklyn's myriad world of painting today. And it just seems right that a painter of Soshu's temperament should choose Brooklyn as his frame of reference. Or rather, in the case of Soshu, as a substrate to be catalyzed.

Pipe Mandala pencil and ink on paper 30 x 22 in. 2012 See larger picture

Soshu lives in Kathmandu, he has never been to the US or much outside the subcontinent so far as I know. His entrance upon the Bushwick and Williamsburg scene has been brazen, obstinate, opinionated, and entirely by way of facebook. Yet an entrance it most certainly has been, and I am strongly of the opinion that Soshu's is a bracing contribution precisely to the art scene that he has chosen to engage and to which he was drawn from afar. His early work of more than about five years ago was inflected by what he calls the "low brow" movement, a kind of international brew of comic, decorative, and graphic art. With surprising speed, and in relative isolation, he put together a fighting palette. The shrewdness of this maneuver impressed me. Irony and panache were achieved that take many a New York artist a decade to achieve. This is thinly veiled by the Himalayan flavor of the paintings, and even that is a conceit. a conceit, no less, that confers mordant humor and originality to Soshu's canvases.

Hermaphroditos Salmacis oil on canvas 26 x 26 in. 2012

Hermaphroditos Salmacis involves the Greek myth of the nymph Salmacis, who raped Hermaphroditos, the beautiful son of Hermes and Aphrodite. The “union” transformed Hermaphroditos into an androgynous being from whom the word hermaphrodite derives. Writes Soshu:

“The mystical derivation would be the belief in holistic transcendence by a union of opposing energies. A completeness and synthesis of opposites. Aphrodite is associated with beauty, Hermes with literature and poetry. Hermaphroditos is the outcome of both, but in male spirit. I think Salmacis is the integration of the female in the symbolism.”

Venom oil on canvas 30 x 30 in. 2013

Soshu's canvases are densely coded, and there are high-pressure zones that gather around matters that need to be "sorted out" as Soshu is fond of saying in the clipped Britishism of the region. This kind of deliberation over a painting is a delight and a relief to me. There is an unhurried generosity here that is appreciated.

— Ethan Pettit, May 2014

Dragon Naga pencil and ink on paper 30 x 22 in. 2011 See larger picture

Library of Babel ink on paper 30 x 22 in. 2011 See larger picture

Alkemikal Soshu on our website

Move in Freedom, September 2013

Deportraiture

Recent paintings and drawings by Barbara Friedman

April 20 - June 29, 2014

Big Collar 1 oil on linen 60 x 48 in. 2014

Big Collar 2 oil on linen 60 x 48 in. 2014

Big Collar 3 oil on linen 60 x 48 in. 2014

catalog (pdf download 4.2 MB)

Portrait of Gertrude van Limborch (after Thomas de Keyser) oil on wood 24 x 18 in. 2014

Over the past two years I’ve parked my easel at the Brooklyn Museum, often in front of Thomas de Keyser’s portrait of Gertrude van Limborch (1632). When I am there I paint my own versions of the portrait, letting my rendition verge on disappearing, or else allowing some features to spring into focus, in a way that threatens to make the source unrecognizable.

These “versions” of the de Keyser contain a trace of Gertrude van Limborch’s face. She is the touchstone for any variations I produce, as the subjects are in other portraits from that era. My purpose in working from these old paintings is to serve both their makers and their subjects: not just to bring de Keyser back into view but van Limborch too, and every other person now long dead who was lively and aware when the painters portrayed them.

Another presence is my mother, who used many aliases during her eventful life. It was only after her death that I discovered that as a child she went by the name Gertrude. She invented so much about her life that her adult existence became a distorted portrait she had painted of herself, barely showing the girl Gertrude she had started out as.

One prominent feature of many of these paintings is the Dutch ruff collar. This was a big starched and pleated collar, a style that lasted from about 1550 to 1650. A “pinwheel” around the neck, the ruff was also used on sleeve cuffs. The discovery of starch allowed ruffs to be formed in elaborate figure-eights. The ruff held one’s head up in a haughty pose, aristocratically, with obvious appeal for wealthy Europeans of the time. Queen Elizabeth I wore a ruff, but she issued decrees that limited the size and even the colors of ruffs that could be worn by commoners outside the royal court. In some of the newest paintings from this series the collar is extremely exaggerated.

Although these paintings still riff off my museum studies, they play more aggressively with scale and color, and bring the ornate ruff collar into the territory of gender, class, and body issues. — Barbara Friedman, April 2014

Portrait of Gertrude van Limborch Thomas de Keyser (Dutch 1596/97 - 1667) at the Brooklyn Museum

Cropped Gertrude oil on linen 48 x 16 in 2014

The “portrait” has been Barbara Friedman’s idiom of choice in recent years, and yet portraiture is only one dimension of what the critic Lilly Wei calls, without exaggeration, a “formally inventive” approach to painting. These are instinctive and erudite paintings, and they summon a formidable range of strategies. Friedman sets up her easel in museums and pretends to copy the old masters, a trope she associates with “lady” painters. Then comes a subtle but unrelenting process of distortion, destruction, and recovery.

Friedman is a professor at Pace University, a resident of lower Manhattan, and a veteran of the East Village scene. I met Barbara a few years ago when she visited our showroom in Bushwick. Soon after that she became represented at our gallery, and since then she has also showed at Valentine, Studio 10, and Storefront Ten Eyck. Her unearthly portraits have cast a prolonged gaze into this inscrutable demimonde. They are tuned to the habits and the jitters of people who prowl the galleries of Brooklyn and downtown at the present time. And this quality sets them off, distinguishes them as a keen synthesis of painterly and temporal issues.

We are thrilled to be opening Deportraiture on April 19th, a large show of Friedman’s recent work. This show will occupy the front and back rooms of our gallery, it is a thorough display of the work of a painter who has already made a strong showing in Brooklyn. We are honored and proud to host this show, and I hope you will join us for the opening.

— Ethan Pettit, April 2014

Portrait of Gertrude van Limborch (after Thomas de Keyser) oil on wood 24 x 18 in. 2014

Portrait of a Dutch Woman oil on linen 48 x 46 in. 2014

A Ruff Meditation Ethan Pettit

The salient of that febrile mind that tossed and turned between the afflatus of Shakespeare and the appearance of Isaac Newton, was the ruff collar. By some accounts an article of fashion not to be outdone until the 1970s, it was a sartorial pinwheel that couched the head and doubtless gyrated to Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.

At the dawn of empire it sprang from the throat. “Sooner may one guess who shall bear away The Infanta of London, heir to an India,” wrote Donne, than one may guess, “What fashioned hats, or ruffs, or suits next year our subtle-witted antic youths will wear.”

They wore the ruff for about another twenty or thirty years, until the middle of the 1600s. It was an Elizabethan accessory that survived the Thirty Years War, the Eighty Years War, the Civil War, for it was laden with starch. The ruff went out of fashion as the scientific awakening began, but long before the time of the Bach family and the awakening in arts and letters that is still with us, or should be.

In the Meditations Descartes says not simply that he thinks therefore he is. Had he said only that he would have vanished. He says more poignantly that he exists because he can be deceived. If all that he knows and feels is suspect, then he is deceived. But for something to be deceived there must be something to deceive, hence something exists. Here is the astringent reduction, the first picture of the “thing that thinks” which Spinoza would rehearse as well somewhat later.

Most careful attention must have been paid to the head when it had lost trust in its body and the world around it and knew not yet what laws governed bodies in the world. Hence the accordion that unfolds from the neck and buffers the brain in a provisional sphere.

And even among the protestant divines of New England, with their immensely complex interior lives, you find that radiant countenance framed in the ruff. Though here the broad flat collar largely replaced the ruff, still it is on the first governor of Massachusetts. On John Smith of Virginia it is, shockingly, as bizarre as the headdress of Powhatan.

It was in the other Dutch colony, the one north of Flushing Avenue, that Barbara Friedman’s unearthly portraits drew attention to the reflexes of the picture-viewing public. It was an unnerving appearance. And in this new range of portraits her distortions are joined to a beguiling anachronism, a separation of the head by a device from the far side of the modern repertoire, and which sweeps away with not a little pomp all of the tropes that are supposed to populate a canvas.

Portrait of Gertrude van Limborch Thomas de Keyser (Dutch 1596/97 - 1667) oil on canvas, 1632

Gertrude with Green Collar on Red oil on linen36 x 27 in. 2014

Big Portrait of a Dutch Man (after Jacob Backer) oil on linen 48 x 46 in. 2014

Big Collar with Child oil on linen 27 x 36 in. 2014

Big Collar 4 oil on linen 60 x 48 in. 2014

Interleaf Drawings charcoal on glassine on paper 2013

Gertrude's Collar Over an Alpine Village oil on linen 2012-14

Gertrude's Forehead oil on wood 24 x 18 in. 2014

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Notational Abstraction

The shortcuts and deep space of David Rich

April 5 - June 2, 2013

Evening oil on canvas, 56 x 64 in. 2007

catalog (pdf download 2 MB)

David Rich has taught painting and drawing at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design since 1985, and as a visiting artist throughout the US. He now paints full time in St. Paul and New York City. Rich is known for his decisive modeling of abstract pictorial space and for his distinctive style of urban nocturnal landscape.

Tell Me oil on canvas, 54 x 50 in. 2012

But it is not the matter of landscape and abstraction that draws us to the work of David Rich, but rather the optical and the non-optical in his work. Rich’s work has a stringency that avoids the assumed virtue of abstraction. There is in his work a restrained approach and an economy of means that signal other orders of event. The paintings are a pleasure to look at as abstractions and as landscapes, but they offer shortcuts as well to the artwork as a conceptual and non-optical matter — to “things not seen”, as Clarence Morgan aptly puts it in his essay for the catalog that is the principal reference on David Rich at present.

Neva Wuda Thunk It oil on canvas, 56 x 62 in. 2012

It is a creed of our gallery that painting should address the definition of the art object, as the conceptual artists did some 40 years ago. Matters of genre and lineage in painting as such are secondary. So we look for a painting that can free itself up from genre and a take hold of ideation.

Rich's paintings amount to a kind of "index" of marking and noting. It is where abstraction verges upon hermeneutic concerns of language and conceptual art. In Rich’s shorthand, there is a cut-to-the-chase quality that feels like it gets under the hood of things, and does not abide the assumption of abstraction.

Configuration acrylic on paper, 9 x 10.5 in. 2012

Rich has codified abstraction in a way as to wrap up certain of its main issues, and then he also diagrams the outer conditions of the artwork — the material, labor, the ethics of the act. This he does with interventions that are sometimes self-effacing or boldly indifferent to the more optical aspects of the picture. A signature device in Rich’s work is his use of areas of black or deep dark colors to accentuate, lock in, or obliterate passages on the canvas. It invokes flatness, it trades with the “support” that was so important to American color field painters, and the motif of segmentation also draws out the question of an artwork’s organic unity as opposed to its potential disunity, its “rupture”, and so on.

Place of Open Intervals oil on canvas, 56 x 60 in. 2012

David Rich is a respected draftsman-instructor in the considerable world of abstract painting, and a draftsman whose work is committed to the initial proposition of the work of art, not to the perpetuation of a genre. And while “the initial proposition of the work of art” may elicit groans of familiarity, it is also the case that no really interesting contemplation of art is sustainable without it. Art as a species has never been exhausted or overcome by a critical strategy. Though at this point, “abstraction” may yet be overcome by the critical strategy of an artist who puts it to an unexpected use.

These canvases suggest a great deal of scoping, adjusting, and orienting within a renewed domain. That may be a fair enough description of what anyone seeks in a painting. But with the addition of David Rich to our gallery, I do feel we have come closer to articulating what a generalist and conceptualist approach to painting means. I call it a “shaken out” approach, which I assume is not lost upon other observers of painting today.

Little Painting for Charlie Stolerow acrylic on paper, 5 x 7 in. 2012

But if so-called abstract painting once again becomes the default case study for art theory, it stands to reason there might be a shakeup in the various orders of abstractionism. The jargon of abstraction may undergo distortions. Fundamental concepts may be understood in new ways. Once more the special history of painting passes through the general history of art, with both now having imbibed deeply from the wells of conceptual art and critical theory. Painting today is not the revivalist movement it was in the 1980s, where the medium was presented as a provocation by virtue of its being painting and not conceptualism. Now the onus is on the painter to be the conceptualist, and the focus of painting has shifted from style and allegory to include other structures of the artwork as well.

David Rich is a known quantity in circles of abstract painting since the 1970s, sometimes called post-abstraction, where the invisible dimensions of a canvas have been long considered. The 61-year old painter from Minneapolis has captured the interest of young painters in Brooklyn whose work is generalist in approach. And this may be owing to a stripped-down approach that is appealing to artists today who are looking for a new organizing principle for non-objective painting. Rich has reinvented abstraction as a notational form. He has taken from abstraction only as much as he needs to explore art as a general matter, but not enough to get him mired in the vicissitudes of a genre.

Kulu Se acrylic on paper, 9 x 10.5 in. 2012

Episode oil on canvas, 54 x 50 in. 2012

Cutting Light oil on canvas, 56 x 62 in. 2012

The small acrylic works in Rich’s studio on the Lower East Side are a bold, crackling suite of historicist forms, serialized across the room, cinematic, evanescent. Cinematic movement is key to Rich’s paintings. He is an artist who works often with negative space and deep space, and he uses surface space to index these complex, non-optical maneuvers. A frame-like, instantaneous mode of perception stabilizes the focus of his paintings upon more than one structure at a time. Filmic movement jump cuts across the canvas, revealing and effacing, in a shadow movement of the painting that is indifferent to optics, and uncompromising.

Night LES series 2013, acrylic

Night, Summer LES series 2013, acrylic

Painting Creature LES series 2013, acrylic

Interval LES series 2013, acrylic

Painting is not just a matter of adding one thing after another in some sequence of calculated or spontaneous gestures. One must take aim, and the painting should be determined in the first stroke. All subsequent maneuvers are an interrogation of the initial impulse. This does not mean a premeditated painting, but it does mean a process that is reflexive, that tends toward reconciling itself with the “damage done,” so to speak, rather than to try to repair the damage with add-ons.

Warehouses and Water mixed media on paper, 10 x 12 in. 2006

Evening, Warehouses and Water oil on canvas, 42 x 40 in. 2006

Above are a canvas and a sketch from the David Rich catalog of 2010 that are good examples of the cinematic in his work. In the sketch, Warehouses and Water(2006), there is a touch of impressionism just to “cheat” the eye into position. Then in one punch come the frame, the ground, the raw material, as if shot through an old film projector at high speed. A similar effect obtains in the oil painting of the same year, Evening, Warehouses and Water, where a single frame of impressionism beats through the paint at cinematic speed. The vertical scratch of orange light along the side of the building captures the speed, locks the projector in a spasm, a lurch in time where we can grasp a point of velocity.

Intervals mixed media on paper, 12 x 12 in. 2007

In Intervals (2007) there is a bold argument in blue and black, overcast with a vapor of yellow rag-wipe, a bright orange ground lifting from the rear. The whole of the painting is keyed to a neat tie-off in the bottom third and a nudge to the left. At first pass it appears the yellow rag-wipe is a bit timid and arbitrary as painting. On second it becomes clear that it forms a pinwheel of highlights that rotates counterclockwise along an arch supported, indeed, by the bold argument in blue and black. The rotating highlights glide into the source of their light, which of course is in the axis of the tie-off in the bottom third.

There is complicated highlighting in Intervals. Strong passages of orange mitigate the pinwheel of yellow rag-wipe, yet are cold, though orange, for they staunchly belong to another order of events. Indeed, all of the orange passages in this painting are time-based process painting, and each is neatly pegged as such. The orange passages belong to a non-optical phase of the painting. Yet the yellow rag-wipe shares the light of the orange ground and matches it in tone. Still there is a long pull between the two colors. It is a dazzlingly controlled and balanced act that manipulates time and process as it goes.

Night Yard mixed media on paper, 11 x 11 in. 2009

Night Yard (2009) comes toward the end of the David Rich catalog. Again, only the barest amount of impressionism, the elemental reflection off the top of a roof. But the rest of the painting is disembodied metaphysics in a tar pit of negative space. A vacuum sweeps in around the rooftop. The land swells, the roof encapsulates, obtrudes into a polygon. A machined strip of blue zips down the right edge of the painting, against a fat blue brush-off along the top. Some lesser traces of darker blue modulate, and a welter of tarry black cancelation pounds into the canvas from all sides.

There is a crisp unraveling of light and layers on the left side of the painting, where another building is visible behind the rooftop. Here is revealed an editing process that slices like a letter-opener clear through the painting from the left edge. The glint of its blade is seen again on the right. Otherwise the painting is a vortex of negative space, a discourse of anti-matter, all of it wiped out in black perfunctory strokes, cutting few corners. What remains is what is arguable, what cannot be argued is passed over in silence.

David Rich’s paintings are circumspect and sure of aim. To my mind they account for a great deal of what defines a work of art, the visible as well as the process and what is suggested but not seen — the support, the intention, the act, the why, the gestures and their cancelations. It is not much more complicated than that. But it is an intellectual exercise at which David Rich is uncompromising. Things will be sorted out, come hell or high water, on his watch, is the message you get from this work.

— Ethan Pettit, February 2013

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