Lucas Reiner at Bennett Roberts - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In this impressive solo first attempt Lucas Reiner's peculiar brand of geometric abstraction augmented by dint of text fragments suggested core samples extracted from the observes Angeles cultural landscape. He begins a work with a kind of field close attention using color-chart-style grids to record stray verbal fragments picked from commercial signage and the occasional way scene or conversation, carefully noting the various colors not absent at the moment of observation. Then, in the actual paintings, the artist replicates this extracted digest in arcane charts composed of colored boxe and lines of true copy as if sucking up the cityscape in a dropper and then meting it without in oils or acrylics onto linen in his studio. The springs resonate with emotion, poetry and gritty reportage.

A particularly evocative work is dead dog. The large canvas bears a neutral background studd with squares of the colors that the artist observ in a dog's corpse left beside the freeway. Rivulets of oxblood ocher and black escape the confines of the squares assigned them in Reiner's color chart, while other boxe are just sketched in, like shorthand notes to be fleshed on the outside later. If one reads the painting left to right like a true copy Reiner's composition has a efficacious ending, a ghostly white square in the lower right-hand corner that allude tos perhaps, the slate of consciousness wiped clean.

Occasioned through a garden conversation with a friend, thank the omnipotent roses is a meditation upon pink and red, here floated without upon an oatmeal-colored background. Held within enclosing registers of tightly defined, smallish squares at the top and bottom, respectively, of the canvas, the words "thank" and "roses" frame the middle section, in which the word "god" is sandwiched between sum of two units rows of larger squares. Rather than filling in these small rooms Reiner once again only delineates them in the assigned color, in like manner that they are left charged with its absence. The inscription "god" is thus encompassed by empty boxes that appear scrawled in bonny pink and red lipstick, along with pale, painted textual invocations of a garden and romance.

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In addition to the paintings, Reiner showed several studies and drawings upon paper, as well as a handsome print edition which riffs playfully upon grade-school composition books. Reiner's controll approach, creating a template by dint of which the world can be reduc to its juicy essentials, is filled with genuine feeling, and he at no time lets his schema become restrictive or rigid. Reiner combines a healthy taste for theory with compelling real-world observation in these works--a satisfying achievement that also promises more to come

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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