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| Jack
Reilly: The New Abstraction. For
the past three decades, Jack Reilly has continued to challenge
traditional notions of abstraction and painting processes. As
one of the foremost American artists working with shaped canvas,
Reilly has maintained an affinity for purity and simplicity
in painting, albeit shrouded in complex visual systems and laborious
technique. In the late 1970s, he abandoned the basic square or
rectangle canvas, believing it to be too restrictive for the
visual impact and the physical structure of the paintings he
needed to produce. The “New Abstraction” series is the quintessential example of Reilly’s attention to structure and detail combined with elements of randomness and serendipity. Each painting consists of thousands of brushstrokes, painted in acrylic polymers and metallic pigments on a shaped-canvas structure, which is based on mathematical and random geometric designs. Color compositions are emotional, intuitive and theoretical systems, arranged in linear formats that interact with the shape of the canvas. Reilly's color palette and signature brushwork, which originated in his earlier abstract paintings, has been compared to the complexity of Byzantine mosaics and the luminosity of Gothic stained glass. The rich viscosity of Reilly's paint mixture/concoction results in fluid, wet-looking and reflective surfaces. It could be said that these new paintings also pay a playful homage to nineteenth-century Pointillism (without including actual subject matter). On closer investigation, it is evident that these densely-polychromed works are an evolution of Reilly's earlier geometric canvases, incorporating a cross-pollination of painting and sculpture. The work reappraises and comments on evolving issues that originated in twentieth-century abstract painting and continue into today's contemporary genres. Ultimately, these pieces are poetic objects of contemplation, a continuation of Reilly's explorations into the sensuality of color, luster and surface, combined with the dynamic power of shape, line and structure. "The minimalist tag is a bad fit, or at lease a loose one... it would be more accurately defined as maximal and labor intensive." Josef Woodard, Santa Barbara News Press. |
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