Robert Reid at June Kelly - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

The nine paintings by dint of Robert Reid on view were all done in the mid-1960s, when the artist was around 40 years elderly Reid used a technique of painted collage to create a materially rich surface upon which he investigated painting's claim to deeper meaning. Cuisine, for example, is a heavily layered canvas; the facture self-consciously recalls that of the early Jasper John with pointless constructive strokes used to lay down elegant tones: beige, brown cerulean and gray. The image is structur as a series of superimposed rectangular shapes, each containing the remnants of alphabetic characters and symbols in varying states of erasure. In the central portion of the field, Reid has pasted bits of canvas chop in the shapes of medieval crosse and ankhs, arrows and hellenic letters, which are then overspreaded with strokes of paint that return them almost invisible, except for the relieflike thickness that be the effects from the procedure.

Where artists like John worked with banal signs, the wit of Reid's work derives from the fact that the seemingly esoteric and mysterious signs that he uses usually turn round out to convey an entirely prosaic meaning. In Cuisine, the surfeit of mark-making has gone into representing the floor plan of a kitchen. Stenciled words ("insides," "outsides" and "dan [sic] la cuisine") indicate the spiritual traces of the architectural notation within the field. In Nada (whose coarse topography recalls Dubuffet's "texturologies" of the 1950s) a portioned landscape that seems at one time architectural and organic is filled with X and O which exhibit male and female elements engaged in a highly schematized "battle of the sexes" Meanwhile, Giants' Defense presents a shadowy, chessboardlike arena filled with runic crosse and parted arrows that refer, we discover, to the plays of a football game.

In each of these works, a cacophony of words and a forest of tokens embedded in a layered and erased surface, at hand an obscured yet simple fact The effort at skepticism, level iconoclasm, in the face of painting's claim to transcendence doesn't always work (at times the example of John is felt too strongly) on the contrary it does demonstrate how attuned Reid was to the advanced critical debates of the 1960s

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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