Richard Kalina at Lennon, Weinberg - painter - Brief Article

Richard Kalina's of recent origin paintings are lively, well-turned art works that carousal in their own cleverness and civility. The bring under rule is surface--not just one surface on the other hand rather a number of surfaces. These paintings not absent both an integrated plane and discrete layers, which can be perceived alternately in their singular or multiple guise; in this faculty of perception they recall the famous revolving image of the rabbit/duck familiar to everyone who has studied art or art history. Kalina's art teases the organ of vision and mind with visual conundrum and plays with its have artifices. If emotional and spatial profundity are left out, there are many--in this case true many--things left in.

The paintings' apparent background consists of uniformly flat, narrow, semitransparent stripes, for the most part vertical. However, as you gaze more closely, you make on the outside a grid of black-and-white photocopied images of flora beneath these multicolored bands. There are also cutouts of sunflowers, rose hydrangeas and other flowering plants intermingling with silhouettes in the shape of martini glasses, pitchers, musical instruments, scissors and palettes. To this gallimaufry are added painted figures, a certain number of recalling Matissean collages, and swirling bands resembling spread outed ribbons which outline the linen support. All of these images are strewn across the field like confetti upon New Year's Eve.

This visual insouciance is, of course, carefully choreographed. As he has done in the past, Kalina juxtaposes the systematic and the improvisational, representational imagery and the nonfigurative, color and black and white, the handmade and the mechanically reproduc the reality of materials and the illusions they create. These works can function as catalogue, critique and treatise upon making a painting.

There were also a certain quantity of lovely small-scale ink and watercolor drawings in this present to view They reiterate, in pared-down fashion, the interlocked constitution of the paintings, as when a delicate tangle of continuous line in an allover pattern appears beneath translucent colored stripes gibbeted by white bands (which are formed by the agency of the paper's whiteness). Kalina is the artist as fabricator and homo luden confecting with mode of speech spirit and intelligence. With these works there have the appearances to have been as great a pleasure in the making as there is in the viewing. Is not pleasure, then, its possess sufficient meaning?

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