David Rich: Local Implications, 1994-2020
These paintings are grounded in everyday situations, the neighborhood and the studio. And also involve a more intimate level, that of our synapses. Specific but not literal, places for seeing and thinking. Work to be with, upon the slow read.
Paintings that take shape over time, densely layered and decisively edited. Solid and rooted, yet open and breathing. Configurations or neural pathways locking in, setting up a spatial structure that shifts as implied connections and ghost images assert an alternate read.
The resultant painting develops organically, by improvisation, of its own vernacular or notational shorthand. Attuned, emerging through a particular mix of inquiry and necessity.
The Sideways Window is about this intersection of urban landscape, abstract painting, and embodied, lived experience. We are made out of the same stuff as what surrounds us and the air we breathe.
The present-tense place of painting functions as a location device. Physically and psychically. Painting takes on a magnetic force, like an undertone or a depth charge. Chunks of visual thought take on the density of lived experience. Elemental constructions, evoking and provoking charged spaces for looking at and into. As resonant places for seeing, thought, and (to use a frequently-used but still crucial word) reckoning.
- David Rich
