CATALOGUE ESSAYS

In Situ, In Transit: David Reed at Haus Lange

Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Krefeld, 2015

Raphael Rubinstein

Dispersal

While there are few painters who do not, in one way or another, become concerned with architecture—for the simple reason that a painting exists within space and that the space in which it is usually made and encountered is that of architecture—certain painters are more aware than others of how their work responds to and inhabits the built world. The question of architecture and painting is hardly a minor one: it was, after all, the divorce of these two fields, the displacement of the fresco and the altarpiece by easel painting, that marked the origin of the Western painting tradition that has remained dominant for some five centuries. Yet, the mobility of geography, patronage and ideology that painters achieved with the advent of the nomadic easel painting has been perceived by some as a loss, a lamentable separation that needs to be repaired. 

If some kind of unity is achieved when painting and architecture are reunited, there are also risks involved with what we might call “archi-painting.” Fixed in place, a painting that is dependent on a bricks-and-mortar support has no easy escape from its enemies, whether they are driven by ideology or by the relentless desire to remodel interior spaces. Recall, for instance, the destruction of Diego Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural or the fact that apparently not a single original wall painting or wall drawing by Blinky Palermo survives. There are, of course, many counter examples, instances of enduring painting-architecture marriages such as the Rothko Chapel in Houston. As it happens, Haus Lange is also home to a notable mid-20^th century archi-painting, Yves Klein’s “Void Room”; the museum has also been the site of other painting-architecture encounters by artists such as Sol LeWitt, Michael Craig-Martin and Ernst Caramelle.

The approach that David Reed has taken to the relationship between painting and architecture for this exhibition is unprecedented in his work, and, to my knowledge, quite unusual historically. Many aspects of the paintings in the show have been determined by the physical layout of the space where they will be exhibited. The length of each canvas matches or in some precise way corresponds to the length of the specific wall on which it will be hung. In several instances canvases are deployed to make it appear as if they magically continue on the other side of a dividing wall. In other places, paintings on facing walls are made to look as if they were mirror reflections of each other. 

The impact of the floorplan of Haus Lange on this body of work extends even to how the edges of certain canvases have been painted. In one case Reed has made it look as if the image on the picture plane has wrapped around the edge. In other cases the painted image only extends a ¼ of an inch around the edge; some edges are left completely blank, unpainted. A number of these details are visible in the actual Haus Lange installation, while others are concealed because the edge of the painting fits tightly into a corner of the space. (In order to master the complex logistics of these paintings, a scale model of Haus Lange was present in Reed’s studio while the paintings were being made.)

Yet amid all this careful calibration of paintings to architecture, Reed’s intention is not to have his paintings simply accommodate themselves to or augment Mies’s building. Instead, he seeks to transform Haus Lange, to have his paintings interfere with its structural logic. In his own words, Reed wants his work “to be an equal force to the architecture—even destroy the architecture and turn the building into a painting. I wanted to cut the building in half, like Gordon Matta-Clark, but with paintings instead of a chain-saw.” And so he does: because they run the entire length of the walls, his paintings are like horizontal cuts that defy the notion of the building as a contained space.

Reed is hardly the first painter to make paintings with a specific space in mind: artists are always keying their work to the dimensions of galleries and museums. Sometimes this relationship of work to exhibition space is one of site specificity, but the correlation doesn’t have to be so exclusive. A painter might produce a canvas that is as high as the exhibition space can accommodate not in the service of site specificity but simply because he or she wants to show a large as painting as possible. Another artist might choose to work in a certain format because he or she believes that works of that size will be especially effective in the space where they will be first shown. (One manifestation not frequently discussed of the symbiotic relationship of art to exhibition space is how the dimensions of an artist’s work can be influenced by the layout of a gallery where he or she shows consistently over many years.)

Artists like these know perfectly well that their paintings will only remain in a space temporarily and that when and if they are exhibited elsewhere most viewers will be unaware of the role played by the architecture of the first venue. In the case of the paintings that Reed has made for his exhibition at Haus Lange the situation is particularly complicated. If and when these paintings are shown in a different space, viewers might wonder why the edges appear to have been treated inconsistently. Or why what seems to be a single composition has been split into two separate paintings. In the future these paintings may acquire a new content that will revolve around the fact that they were originally made for a specific space and that they were once an ensemble. The likely dispersal of these canvases, the probable breakup of the group, the impending loss of their original context, is already part of their existence. Reed, himself, is well aware of such issues. On one of his working drawings he writes, apropos of Renaissance and Baroque paintings shown in modern museums, “If one doesn’t see what the context was at least one sees the lack of context.” He then wonders about his own paintings: “Will they bring their context with them?”

 

Temporal Orders

At one point in a 1989 interview with fellow painter Stephen Ellis, Reed begins talking about a quattrocento painting he had recently seen in an exhibition of Sienese painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Painted by the Master of the Osservanza, this work (in the collection of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin) belongs to a cycle of paintings depicting scenes from the life of Saint Anthony. Reed shares with Ellis his speculations about the painting: “The artist wanted to portray a religious awakening, but how do you represent something as nebulous as a moment of sudden insight? Saint Anthony is shown once as a boy kneeling before an altar, then as an adolescent listening to a priest read the Gospel and possibly a third time as an older monk praying in the background.” Reed connects this subtle type of continuous representation, or “simultaneous narrative,” as Ellis terms it, to more recent art history. “When similar shifts of time are implied,” Reed says, “in an abstract painting—through the changes of focus I was talking about, through the overlapping sequences of gestures—they can create several temporal orders.” 

Another hint as to how important the Master of the Osservanza was to Reed at the time can be found in Arthur Danto’s review, also dating from 1989, in The Nation of “German Painting Refigured” at the Guggenheim Museum, an exhibition focused on German Neo-Expressionism that Danto judged to be “an appallingly curated show.” At the end of the piece, which must count as one of the most negative reviews in the recent history of art criticism, Danto writes how Reed, whom he calls “a gifted and generous artist,” joined him on one visit to the exhibition and how the two friends found themselves walking “faster and faster down the ramp, repelled by the arrogance and emptiness, the crudeness and shrillness, the crowing self-congratulation of painter after painter.” Danto then describes how Reed “brightened at the idea of going down to see, once again before the great show of Sienese art closed at the Met, the Master of the Osservanza.” 

Anyone who is familiar with Reed’s career knows how much art history has meant to him, whether it is a matter of learning lessons from Italian Baroque painting or delving into the forgotten history of New York in the 1970s. While it is not at all unusual for an artist to be concerned with the past of his or her medium, Reed is unusual in his ability to translate venerable techniques and ideas into absolutely contemporary terms. Reed’s refusal to let an interest in art history result in work that resembles earlier styles is especially noteworthy at a moment when the concept of “atemporality” has been cited as a justification for praising derivative painting.

I’d like to propose that Reed’s description of the Master of the Osservanza’s painting of Saint Anthony has particular relevance for his recent work. In the decades since his conversation with Ellis and his visits to the Guggenheim and the Met with Danto, Reed has continued to create abstract paintings with “several temporal orders” through shifts in color, surface and light. Indeed, it might even be said that temporality is the central theme of his work. Reed’s paintings invite us to think about how slow or fast different parts of a painting were made, about the changing velocity of our attention and perception as we scan a painting with our eyes. In another sense, his work is about time in its constant, but always incredibly subtle, dialogue with art history, near and far. Nowhere, however, has the concept of a painting containing distinctly different moments in time been more explicitly addressed than in the paintings that Reed has made for his show at Haus Lange. 

Reed’s strategy for folding different moments into his work involves including in every canvas in the show at least one, and sometimes more than one, gestural mark that has been taken from one of Reed’s own earlier paintings. (There is only one newly made gestural mark in this suite: the starkly isolated band uncoiling itself on the far left side of Painting A: Reed refers to this brush mark, in one of his working drawings, as “an anchor for all the paintings in Haus Lange.”) His sources include a 1975 drawing (D-1) and two more recent paintings, 555 (2003-2006) and 602-2 (2007-2011). Viewers don’t necessarily need to know about the pre-history of these motifs in order to engage Reed’s new paintings. For one thing, these recycled images are rotated from their original orientations and are often so camouflaged by layers of newly minted elements that they can be hard to see, much less recognize as twice-told visual tales. Of equal importance in allowing these paintings to be read not solely as an artist’s retrospective glance back at his own career is the connection between the paintings and the architecture of Haus Lange—a connection that is far more evident, at least at first glance, than the references to the artist’s past work. These paintings have so obviously been made to institute a visual and conceptual dialogue with the space, they are so obviously anchored in the circumstances of the Spring of 2015 in Krefeld, it is only with sustained concentration that we can think about them as exercises in pictorial autobiography.

Nonetheless, the glance back is a fact, so maybe worth dwelling on a bit longer. In conversation with me Reed has located one inspiration for these paintings in “Heart of Glass,” his 2012 survey show at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. For that exhibition some of Reed’s paintings were hung nearly edge to edge, which mean that the horizontal paintings created a long friezelike continuum. Being able to visually traverse paintings made in different years may have awakened his curiosity about what would happen if he placed images from different points of his life on the same canvas. It’s also worth noting that Reed has reached an age when he can look back at nearly a half century of being a painter: perhaps it seemed like a good moment to reconnect with some old acquaintances. 

Are there other reasons, besides the obvious explanation of an autobiographical impulse, why Reed would want to conjoin “several temporal orders”? Let’s go back to the conversation with Stephen Ellis. “How do you represent something as nebulous as a moment of sudden insight?” Reed wondered, apropos of the Master of the Osservanza’s Saint Anthony painting. We can interpret these paintings as an attempt by an artist to make some sense of his own life, an attempt to comprehend how so many separate moments (of painting, of perception, of influence, of being) can be embodied in a single painting. We are all of us constantly representing to ourselves some version of our own lives, and precariously trying to make that auto-history cohere with the experience of a moment. Standing in front of a painting, Reed seems to be telling us, might be the perfect situation in which to achieve that precarious coherence.

 

More Paintings About Buildings and Pools

The pool in the title of this exhibition, “The Mirror and the Pool,” denotes, in the first place, to a very specific pool: the one depicted in David Hockney’s Portrait of Nick Wilder (1966), a 72-inch-square canvas in which Wilder, an important Los Angeles art dealer who was a friend and early supporter of Reed’s, is seen half submerged in the swimming pool of his Los Angeles condominium. Among the best known of Hockney’s swimming pool paintings, it celebrates, with a stranger’s keen eye, Southern California’s relentless light and palpable sensuality, Although Reed’s title draws our attention to the pool in Hockney’s painting, I suspect that the modernist apartment building in the background is of equal importance to this artist for whom architecture, and especially California modernist architecture, has long been central.

Reed has often linked his work to architecture. He titled his first mature body of work “Door Paintings” (1974) because their dimensions, 76 by 38 inches, were based on standard house doors.  Architecture is also the source of his often stated  ambition to be a “bedroom painter” (a concept he got from a conversation with Nick Wilder). In the “Artist’s Chronology” in his traveling 1999 U.S. survey, “Motion Pictures,” Reed not only associates many of his earliest visual memories with architecture, but also includes photographs of numerous buildings, from the modernist house he grew up in, designed by his architect uncle, to homes by Rudolf Schindler and Albert Frey. Although there are no obvious allusions to architecture in his paintings, Reed is, in fact, among the contemporary artists most indebted in his thinking to architecture. For me, his dialogue with architecture gains resonance through its quasi-covert nature. Unlike so many other contemporary painters, Reed doesn’t feel the need to provide us with instantly identifiable content in the form of easily recognizable cultural references. 

Pools were constantly on Reed’s mind throughout the summer of 2014 as he began working on the paintings for Haus Lange (they were completed in the first two months of 2015). He began to think of the building as a kind of swimming pool, which was one of the factors that led him to use generous amounts of blue. He also realized how his long horizontal paintings resemble windows at an aquarium insofar as they invite spectators to look at them along the length of the paintings rather than remaining stationary, directly in front of the canvas, as one does with more traditional formats where the viewer’s movement is generally on a perpendicular rather than parallel axis. 

Important aspects of the paintings depend on this lateral movement. Walking along the length of the paintings at Haus Lange one can notice changing visual effects. The “interference colors” Reed uses and the natural light—pouring into the galleries from the wide plate-glass windows on the rear side of the villa’s ground floor—combine to create distinctive shifts of hue and brightness in certain paintings, especially the G paintings along one wall of the Klein “Void” room and the nearby D painting. Depending on the angle at which one is looking at the painting, the blue cutout areas around and underneath the stenciled white brushstrokes can appear bright, almost metallic or muted and unreflective. A more startling effect came when one viewed painting A from close to its left edge.  From this extreme oblique angle a fluorescent green emanates from several points on this extremely long canvas, but when one moves away the green vanishes. It took me several back-and-forth journeys before I understood that the thick Davy’s Gray gestures on the painting, which interact with the white and lilac underneath, were reflecting the grass and trees in the gardens visible outside a nearby window. 

As the work progressed Reed also began to note the affinities between his paintings and Matisse’s La Piscine (1952), which in the fall of 2014 went on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the first time in several decades. There are, indeed, striking visual similarities between Matisse’s blue-on-white paper cut-out frieze of diving and splashing swimmers and Reed’s Haus Lange paintings, especially paintings E and G in which sinuous blue and gray shapes traverse the canvas in arching, diver-like rhythms amid blue drips and white lines that strongly suggest sprays of water. (Another aquatic-themed work on Reed’s mind was Cézanne’s Bathers, specifically the version that belonged to Matisse.)

The parallels between La Piscine and Reed’s Haus Lange paintings are structural as well as compositional. By “structural” I mean how each body of work was made for a specific space. The lengths of the paper supports of La Piscine are every bit as determined by the configurations of Matisse’s studio at the Hotel Régina in Nice as the lengths of Reed’s paintings are by the layout of Haus Lange. For both Matisse and Reed, the irregular features of the architecture become occasions for creative problem solving. I’m thinking, for instance, of the section of La Piscine made to fit above a double door in Matisse’s studio, and the way in which Reed deals with an anomaly at one of the corners of the walls around Klein’s “Void” room. (The blue of paintings E and G, by the way, is meant as an homage to Klein’s IKB pigment.)

By giving this show the title “The Mirror and the Pool,” does Reed want us to think about the myth of Narcissus? Whether he does or not, this is a title that must lead us there, if only to pass through to the other side. The pool is a mirror only as long as we remain outside of it. The moment we plunge into those watery depths our image is no longer doubled, or, rather, our doubled image is no longer stable.

 

Stencils and Studies

Although Reed has sometimes incorporated silkscreened “copies” of motifs from his past work into new paintings, this is the first time that he has used stencils in the making of his paintings.  The idea came to him because he had been employing stencils in color studies where he needed to efficiently reproduce a composition multiple times in order to see how it would be affected by different colors. (In the color studies for the Krefeld paintings, the stencils employed are 1/5 the size of the actual brush marks.)

To generate the stencils he will sometimes take tracings from older paintings, translating the visual and topographic features (“topographic” because the tracings also register surface variations, not unlike a rubbing) of the painting into templates that can, in turn, replicate the three-dimensional tracing/rubbing as a two-dimensional image.  This process is, of course, quite different from using a photograph of a painting to generate a silkscreen, as Reed did of a couple of occasion in the mid-1990s. (The paintings #339, 1994, and #343, 1994-95, feature brushstrokes and silkscreened versions of those brushstrokes on the same canvas. Reed soon stopped using silkscreens because, as he remarked to me, the process was “too cumbersome, too much like Warhol and too photographic.”) Unlike silkscreens, stencils require a physical touching of the source painting: they are indexical and tactile. However, Reed also uses photographic images and scans to generate stencils, which for all the Haus Lange paintings are cut out by a digital machine process. During a studio visit, Reed pointed out to me that the machine is good at outlines and with strong value contrasts but not in picking out details in the interior of the mark, which is one reason why many layers of stencils are required to make a single “brushstroke” image—far from being any kind of shortcut, stenciling in Reed’s studio is an extremely labor-intensive process. Although there is digital technology involved in the stencil-making process, Reed recognizes the venerable nature of this method; he is sure that Titian and Poussin used stencils to flip figures in some of their paintings. He also believes that Malevich must have used “some kind of stencil, a kind of prototape.”

It’s important to note that no single prior “Color Study” corresponds exactly to the final painting. For all their meticulous planning and technical complexity the paintings eventually arrive at the moment when Reed must improvise the ultimate gesture, here done with the color known as Davy’s Gray applied with a painting knife. And yet, although this sinuous final gesture (which involves a performative and, indeed virtuosic quality that has hitherto been absent from the slow, exacting process of applying grounds, building up stenciled images and painting the “cut-out” shapes around them) is improvised, it is informed by the many color studies for which Reed has executed similar gestures at a much smaller scale. To the artist’s surprise, these improvised full-scale gestures are sometimes quite close to those in the color studies. The similarity is unintentional but may be the result, the artist suggested to me, of “muscle memory.”

It is typical of Reed to simultaneously embrace deep art history and up-to-date technology in his working process. It is also typical of him to be entangled with his own past work. When paintings return to his studio from exhibitions, he will often rework parts of them, even to the point of sanding down large areas of the canvas and repainting them with different colors and shapes. (Paintings that undergo this degree of reworking are designated with a “- 2” after the original number.) During his exhibition “Heart of Glass: Paintings and Drawings 1967-2012” at the Bonn Kunstmuseum in 2012 Reed took advantage of his temporary access to paintings that had been borrowed for the show to take tracings of their surfaces for possible future use (some of these tracings were turned into stencils for the Haus Lange paintings).

Reed’s reengagement with his own work doesn’t involve only older paintings—he also returns, in various ways, to paintings he has just completed.  The “Working Drawings” he makes for each painting not only chronicle the progress of the painting but also include Reed’s reflections on the work after it has been finished, and often feature miniature versions of the painting that are made after its completion. For the paintings in “The Mirror and the Pool” he has introduced a further “post-completion” component: “index” color studies in which the five recycled brush marks have been stenciled onto long horizontal panels of DiBond in only black and white. As well as connecting to the black and white palette of Reed’s “Brush Stroke” paintings of the late 1970s, these index studies may assist viewers to discern the stenciled gestures in the full-scale paintings, which have been made deliberately hard to see underneath blue and lilac interference colors and brand-new gray gestural marks. They also provide a condensed overview of Reed’s evolving gestural style, which has gone from plain straight strokes to baroquely tangled knots.

 

The Transience of Painting

Following his usual practice, Reed developed the paintings for Haus Lange more or less simultaneously. As he explained to Pia Gottschaller in a 2012 interview, he works on “many paintings at once because before I can take the next step I have to wait for the surfaces to dry. I’m not always sure what glazes will look like when they are dry and, working flat, nor am I sure what the painting will look like on the wall.” During visits to Reed’s studio in late 2014 and early 2015 I was able to observe some of this process as he and his assistants were making the paintings for “The Mirror and the Pool.” The studio is divided into different workspaces. In the largest space, paintings are hung on the walls or placed flat on trestles to be worked on or to dry (Reed works on his paintings in both positions). While they dry, usually with the help of small electric fans, the paintings are protected by tentlike sheets of cardboard and mosquito netting suspended a few inches above them. Another space is set aside for sanding and spraying.  In a separate smaller space the walls were filled during the past year with color studies as well as a small reproduction of Hockney’s Portrait of Nick Wilder and some photographs of Yves Klein in his “Void” Room at Haus Lange.

 Reed is keenly aware of how paintings can change over time. In a recent studio conversation he told me how he has noticed some subtle changes in works by Jackson Pollock since when he first saw them in New York City museums. As happens in Pollock’s work, and with many other painters, as the oil soaks out of a mark made with oil or alkyd paint, it will create a ring around the mark. Reed recalls that the oil rings around some of the drips and splatters on Pollock’s paintings have lost the shiny and warmly colored qualities that he remembers from when he first saw them. 

The phenomenon of separated oil surrounding painted marks with less strongly colored halos may have helped inspire, perhaps unconsciously, a frequent feature of Reed’s work in which a gestural mark is surrounded by a differently colored ground whose contours closely follow the contours of the gestural mark. It looks as if the ground color has seeped out of the gesture, though the two elements have actually been painted separately. (This feature does not figure very much in the Haus Lange paintings, but it was prominently on display in Reed’s 2012 Kunstmuseum Bonn show in works such as #349 from 1996, #470 from 2001 and #555 from 2003-2006.)

In this complex procedure of multiple phases Reed is constantly revising his ideas about how a painting should look. His curiosity for new techniques, new methods and new compositions means that he is always being confronted with studio problems where he and his assistants have to stop work and figure out how to go forward. This sometimes involves moving backwards, redoing a painting from the beginning. Although there is little obvious trace of them in the finished paintings, these recurring technical glitches, these unforeseen errors, are an important and indispensible part of Reed’s creative method. He seems to deliberately put himself in a position where unexpected difficulties arise in order to provoke opportunities to ponder the seemingly endless subtleties and paradoxes of his medium. Because of their dependence on Mies’s design and because they were unlike anything Reed had attempted before, the Haus Lange paintings were particularly dense with such opportunities. In a note to himself on one of the working drawings, Reed writes: “I keep thinking that there will be an impasse with no possible solution—so far it hasn’t happened.”

As a painter who emerged in the 1970s, the decade when the discourse around painting was at its most eschatological, Reed has extensive experience with artistic impasses and overcoming them. His primary means of moving forward from abstraction’s zero-degree, which his “Brush Stroke” paintings crystallize so perfectly, has been twofold: to restore to painting many of the properties that were eliminated under the logic of reductivist formalism and to discover, with imagination and rigor, new ways of acknowledging that a painting is an object in space as well as a carrier of images. The Haus Lange installation of “The Mirror and the Pool” represents the most compelling realization to date of this double project.