Richard Kalina at Lennon, Weinberg - New York - art exhibition

Surprisingly, Richard Kalina's fresh medium-sized abstract grid paintings are built up of a great many small, rectangular pieces of rice paper. The proces of creating these works involved painting sheets of rice paper in a solid color with thin acrylic paint, then tearing up the sheets and gluing down the resulting pieces onto a raw linen support, parts of which had been painted white. The blockish light brown linen canvas is always expos along the margins of the support, framing and containing the brightly colored symmetrical configuration at its center The thinly painted, diaphanous rectangles, which achieve greater density of color where they overlap, function as simulacra of brushmarks or as tesserae in a mosaic. Kalina's bright, translucent palette brings watercolor and smooth stained glass to mind. The white underlayer accentuates the luminosity. more [i]or[/i] less of the compositions also recall the quilts of Gee's Bend, about which the artist has written [see A.i.A., Oct '03]

In Esperanto (2003) the r attenuated arms of a of greece cross at the center of the composition are partly overlapped by dint of framing bars of dark and light verdant which are themselves surrounded by the agency of a field of yellow. The large rectangular areas between the arms of the cros are filled with small squares of dark and light amethystine Still smaller squares of raw canvas are left expos at the center of the specks where the rectangular bars forming the cros and the framing virid bars meet. Thin, white horizontal and vertical lines of flashe interconnect these light brown squares and move swiftly on to the periphery of the canvas, thereby bisecting the cros and bars.

These paintings derive their visual pierce in part from the boldnes of their luminous color schemes and their optical push-pull events Also important is how the order of their designs is not always reverenceed in the choice of shade or tone, and how the torn cutting sides of the rice paper create wavy, life-filled lines. Meticulously planned, at the same time playful, these intricately layered mode of buildings allow for layered readings. Thus Esperanto, the title of which call forths the wannabe universal language, can be read as a sod plan for some utopian work of urbanism. This is a prime example of the optically dazzling, thought-provoking, abstract geometry that is Kalina's specialty.

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