The Spirit of Flowers Appear - Roland Reiss's Paintings at Oceanside Museum of Art

Roland Reiss

Unrepentant & Unapologetic Flowers Plus Small Stories

Oceanside Museum of Art, Oceanside CA

Through September 8, 2019

8. Fleur du Mal II (#621)
2008
Acrylic on canvas   68" x 52"

 

 

 

*All images courtesy of the artist and Diane Rosenstein Gallery

Article by Cathy Breslaw

Over the course of my life, I have sought out nature in all its forms including mountains, forests, hills, oceans, rivers, lakes, big skies and sunsets, across several countries – all with the expressed purpose of encountering the power and spirit of the universe.   I knew I would find it in these places.  As I walked through Roland Reiss’s Flower paintings(2007-present), these same feelings emerged –awe, wonder and the spirit of an exuberant artist who wants to ‘show’ rather than  ‘tell’.  This is evident in the fact that Reiss requested that no identifying information be placed beside each artwork. – no painting titles, sizes, mediums etc that we typically see elsewhere that art is exhibited. We are left on our own to observe and discover what these paintings communicate to us.

Flowers are the vehicle which Reiss uses to express color.  ‘Color’ is not an element of his works, it is the primary language. As a master technician in art-making, these expressions come across as easily as speaking a native language is to us. Being in the exhibition space in the presence of these paintings is reminiscent of southern California skies after a storm when the light is sharp, clear, bright and fresh.  The color combinations are vivid, intense, glowing and full of emotion. He wants us to feel his joy and to find our own.

Reiss plays with figure and ground in his compositions –in most of the paintings the imagery appears to float within the spaces of the canvases, and in others the ground is implied – where we may see a few flower pedals sitting alongside a vase. Once again, he wants us to ‘fill in the blanks’. The context or reference points are often missing. Reiss also manipulates spaces within each of his paintings. In some, the flowers appear to be three dimensional while others are simultaneously flat. Collapsing and expanding spaces add another dimension which challenges what a painting can be.

Another group of works appear to have vertical structural supports of stems for his flowers around and within which there are layers of tiny but discernible images of architecture – skylines of cities, capitol government buildings, museums, as well as monkeys, dancing people, butterflies, birds, geometric and abstracted shapes, and more. The imagery floats around like passing thoughts. Bouquets of flowers become worlds within worlds.

While most of the paintings have flat precisely crafted surface paint, there is a selection of those with a deliberate pattern of thick, textured sculptural brushstrokes. Multi-colored brushstrokes also appear as imagery within others works.

Its as if Reiss is holding a conversation about painting in his works.  He defies convention while charming us with the amazing range of color variations, varieties of flowers, imagery and general “eye candy”.  The standard compositions, color relationships, two and three-dimensional spaces, and the nature of and use of brushstrokes – the traditional  tenets of painting - all come into question in how they are played out.

Another portion of Reiss’s exhibition are the Small Stories -  sculptural tableaux which the artist is widely known for, and which he calls “three dimensional paintings”. These clear acrylic boxes contain cinematic miniature scenes that play out varying social, political and cultural scenarios referencing contemporary life, and where it is left up to the spectator to comprehend. 

In the title of Reiss’s exhibition: Unrepentant & Unapologetic Flowers, he addresses the notion of painting flowers as a disenfranchised subject. In one of the several personal statements about his work posted throughout the show, Reiss notes that the art world is generally dismissive of flowers as subject matter. It also goes along with the notion of beauty as a simple, trivial, superficial and irrelevant subject in art.  Seeing Reiss’s exhibition proves this wrong – that flowers (and beauty itself) grabs us humans at a deep unconscious level, one of the spirit – and there is nothing more important to contemporary society than to lift the human spirit and soul – and Reiss’s paintings do exactly that.

je t’aime en noir (#946)
2016
oil and acrylic on panel   30" x 24"

F/X: In Search of Truth (#46)
1990
Mixed media
24.5 x 24.5 x 14 inches

Unrepentant Flowers: Red (#995)
2017
oil and acrylic on panel  30" x 48"

Sunflowers at Night (#672)
2013
Oil and acrylic on canvas   68" x 52"

Unrepentant Flowers: Starry Blue
2017
Oil, acrylic and ink on panel   30" x 24"

Argentina Artist Guillermo Kuitca at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles

Guillermo Kuitca

Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles

Thru August 11^th

Article by Cathy Breslaw

Guillermo Kuitca, The Family Idiot 2019 Oil on canvas in artist frame
92.5 x 186 cm / 36 3/8 x 73 1/4 in Triptych: 92.5 x 186 cm / 36 3/8 x 73 1/4 in overall©
Guillermo Kuitca, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & WirthPhoto: Gonzalo Maggi

Guillermo Kuitca’s paintings, works on paper and sculpture encompass both public and private psychic spaces. Architecture, blueprints, theater seating charts and maps are the structural forms from which he creates his works. In his first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, Kuitca presents several distinct types of work. The Family Idiot (2018-2019) series are a group of oils on canvas that are framed in wood – some are diptychs and triptychs which sit on an eye-level table while others hang on the wall. A combination of abstraction and figuration, these works are mostly darkened tonated reds, grays, and black – the paintings take us into parts of rooms and places with no reference points. They feel like dislocated personal psychological dream-spaces which are both haunting and beautiful and where the imagery can be difficult to discern. At times it seems we are peering into windows as voyeurs and viewing intimate and unclear experiences at a distance.

The smaller mixed media works on paper are untitled but refer to specific performance halls around the world – Hollywood Bowl, Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Opera House, Palais Garnier, Sydney Opera House, Oslo Opera House and others. Kuitca manipulates these seating charts to distort, meld and collapse physical spaces and as in his paintings, these works can be disorienting – contrary to the usual focus on a theater’s stage, the main event is the distortions of the empty seats identified by seat numbers. Each of these multi-colored strongly hued works take on a different character and are at times, more like drawings than paintings. Some retain their chart-like structure while others are fuzzy explosions of colors with shapeless forms that twist, bend and drip.

A recent body of work Missing Pages (2018), is a series of 18 canvases linked together in a grid pattern, taking its structure from the layout of a printer’s proof. The imagery in these oil paintings contain both figurative and geometric shapes, where connections to one another can be simultaneously both identifiable as well as confusing.

Retablo (2016) is an installation work which is accessed up a set of stairs into a darkened unfinished gallery space. Lit from within, this free-standing large oil painting on wooden panels references Cubism in its geometric divisions of carved up spaces and its neutralized dark greens, browns, reds, and grays. Set inside a large vertical deep wooden box, it appears as a stage, or backdrop. Altar-like in its lighted inner space, there is a brown road painted in the center leading into the narrowing distance to a seemingly imaginary place.

Kuitca who lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina uses his experiences with theater, philosophy and literature to create paintings, mixed media works, installation and sculpture that take viewers out of their comfort zone, and disrupts and challenges us to question where we are in space and time.