Art review: Richard Aldrich @ Marc Foxx Gallery
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The tensions between conceptual art and painting have been in evidence going on almost 50 years, which makes Richard Aldrich‘s supple engagement with the subject now all the more surprising. Ten recent works at Marc Foxx, the Brooklyn-based artist’s second show with the gallery, are collectively called ‘Slide Paintings.’
Remember slides? Pre-digital photographic transparencies once formed a primary means of visual information and image-sharing, inside the art world and out. But no more. Now slides are as old-fashioned a technology as -- well, paintings.
Along with other maneuvers Aldrich smushes slides and paintings together in three unpainted canvases of white linen with back-lighted slides embedded in the surface. The slide imagery -- monochrome abstraction, a painted couple in conversation and a double exposure showing pictures and objects in a gallery exhibition -- cover the conceptual waterfront.
Other works employ attached objects (strips of wood, rolled cloth, a small religious talisman, etc.) as equivalents for a painting’s brushstrokes, or paint applied in abstract patches that make you think of everything from a lichen-covered garden wall to a Jasper Johns painting. ‘ufo2’ slices out a diamond-shape from the middle of a canvas, its layered shadows, cast on the wall behind it, forming an ephemeral internal drawing, and its shape slipping into the illusion of a rectangle tipped back in perspective.
Precedents from Arthur Dove to Lucio Fontana could be cited -- rather the way a photographic slide pictures an absent work of art. ‘Kimono,’ at 7 feet tall one of the largest canvases, crosses crimson horizontals with a pair of yellow-flecked gray verticals to evoke the ritual garment of the title -- not to mention the ritual-reality of painting as cloth smudged with a pattern of colors, casually accepted in Western culture.
-- Christopher Knight
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Marc Foxx Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857 5571, through Oct. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.marcfoxx.com
