Molly Warnock, catalog essay for Aletheia, High Noon Gallery, November 2024
David Rhodes: Scansion
Produced between March and September 2023, the half-dozen compositions on canvas gathered in this show open a new chapter in the remarkably coherent body of work David Rhodes has created over the past twenty years. As with prior painting groups during that period, their making involves a simple yet never entirely systematized process of masking the artist has described in terms of willed indirectness or procedural blindness.(1) Working from top to bottom along each of the two lateral edges in turn—first the left, then the right—Rhodes applies lengths of tape diagonally to the stretched, raw canvas. Although they are identically oriented within each section, the bands vary in width, as do the intervals between them; their disposition is worked out directly on the surface. Using a cutter, he trims both sets of tape segments at some distance from the central vertical axis before brushing the whole of the partially concealed expanse with carbon black acrylic paint. In a final step, he removes the adhesive strips to reveal the previously reserved support, now irregularly limned by the inevitable bleeds. Each work is typically completed within a single day, and each is titled after the corresponding date.
With their straightforward facture and linear motifs, Rhodes’s abstractions have long been likened to Frank Stella’s paintings with black stripes flatly applied in concentric rectilinear patterns from the years 1958 to 1960. Rhodes has repeatedly avowed his admiration for Stella’s art, both in interviews and in his critical writing. Yet he has equally pushed back against the oft-rehearsed narrative according to which the Black Paintings signify essentially as a hinge from modernist abstraction to minimalist objecthood, expunging pictorial illusionism in favor of a wholly lucid remarking of painting’s literal physicality. Stella’s epochal works do not, in Rhodes’s telling, exhaust the medium; nor does their pragmatic making obviate expressiveness. Retrieving the density of experience those paintings in fact enable, he privileges the Stella who “rejected ... any guarantee afforded by easy rhetoric” and embraced the idea that “a painting did much of the work of generating meaning itself.”(2) This commitment lies at the heart of Rhodes’s own practice.
Rhodes’s earlier works establish a distinctive set of preoccupations. Consider Untitled, 2013. Like many of the painter’s compositions prior to the present group, the canvas has a tripartite construction, the artist having masked and painted each of the three vertical sections consecutively. Here as elsewhere, the diagonals form differently oriented chevrons reminiscent not only of the nested V-forms in Stella’s Black Paintings but also of the adjacent modules in his later shaped paintings: the Valparaiso group of 1963, for example, or the Notched-V series of 1964 to 1968. Yet Rhodes holds fast to the taut rectangular support, as if deliberately reopening pictorial issues long presumed “solved” by his predecessor—most notably, the relationship of the composition to its support. His chevrons do not sit entirely within their framing bounds, but register as actively—indeed, quasi-photographically—cropped by them.
Eschewing Stella’s rigorously deductive logic and strictly iterative structure—the steady march of his nested bands of equivalent width—Rhodes also confronts anew the question of how to get “from one side of a painting to the other.”(3)
The painted and unpainted intervals composing the V-forms in Untitled alternately expand and contract; the passage from one lateral edge to the other is here dilated, there accelerated. That traversal is further complicated by the subtle yet decisive disjunctions that occur along the vertical axes dividing one set of oblique lines from the next. Slivers of unpainted canvas appear within the black zones, while abutting bands of the revealed support, successively masked and of different widths, fail to line up precisely, instead appearing irregularly notched at the internal jointures. These improvised connections, never wholly foreseeable in the temporally fractured course of their making, register as attentive to the discontinuous rhythms of lived experience, to the manifold ruptures and redoublings of everyday life. Where Minimalism picks up Stella’s Black Paintings from the angle of objectness, Rhodes at once draws out and disrupts their implicit chronometry.
Finally—and no less important for the continued development of Rhodes’s work—the rhythmic articulation of the surface effected by the unpainted interstices modulates the black field from within, rendering it differentially luminous. One is reminded of Matisse’s quantity-quality equation, which we might adapt as follows: One square centimeter of any black is not as black as a square meter of the same black; the quantity of a color is its quality. Color, here, is conceived not in terms of compositional interplay but entirely as an affair of spacing, integrally bound up with drawing (a point driven home by Untitled’s exclusive recourse to graphic, black-white contrast).(4) Dilation and acceleration are equally darkening and lightening.(5)
The paintings shown at High Noon take over all of this, with a crucial difference. Now the vertical fissure runs through the center, appearing alternately as a kind of negative column and as nothing at all, less a shape than a caesura. Varying in width from one painting to the next, that gap is flanked on both sides by leftward-descending lines. In retrospect, this shift was prepared by Rhodes’s move to a more band-like central section in various tripartite paintings from the past few years, such as 20 October 2022 (Partita), 2022. Yet the passage from band to rift decisively changes the effect of the whole. Stripped of contrapuntal diagonals, the consistent directionality of the gleaming obliques in the most recent work appears powerfully attuned to the one-way flow of time, its relentless yet internally riven drift. Meanwhile, the newly bilateral compositions and upright formats heighten the address to the standing human form, at once returning and slipping away from the beholder’s binocular gaze. It is in time, these paintings say, that we are made and unmade; and time keeps going on.
Molly Warnock
1. This interest in procedural blindness, a longstanding aspect of Rhodes’s practice, links his work to the noncompositional practices of a number of postwar European painters he especially admires, including Simon Hantaï, Michel Parmentier, and Martin Barré. While this will not be my central focus in the following, these commitments underwrite and problematize his relationship to American minimalism and its complex atermath.
2. David Rhodes, “Frank Stella: Black, Aluminum, Copper Paintings,” The Brooklyn Rail (July-August 2012).
3. I take this phrasing from Rhodes’s own account of the Black Paintings; see his “Frank Stella,” op. cited. Interestingly, Rhodes’s formulation foregrounds the movement between lateral edges—as opposed to Michael Fried’s canonical account of deductive structure, which portrays the Black Paintings as generated from the framing edges inward. This sense of lateral movement is a defining aspect of Stella’s markedly horizontal shaped canvases of the 60s, as of Rhodes’s own paintings, which often have a frieze-like, processional quality. For Fried’s account, see “Three American Painters” (1965), rpt. in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998): 213–65.
4.These lines are indebted toYve Alain Bois’s masterful analysis of the quantity-quality equation and its consequences in Matisse’s art; see his “Matisse and ‘Arche-Drawing,’” in Painting as Model (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990): 3–63. Importantly for the present purposes, Bois suggests that Matisse came to this recognition in the course of making three black-and-white woodcuts that he exhibited in the late winter and spring of 1906 (ibid, 29).
5.This is roughly the territory on which one might begin to explore Rhodes’s decision to title the High Noon exhibition after Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of aletheia, the Greek concept of truth, as disclosure or unconcealing. As Heidegger reads it, aletheia is precisely not an understanding of truth as adequation; rather, it is a kind of illumination, inevitably time-bound, that cannot happen apart from a simultaneous veiling or concealment.
Molly Warnock is the author of the monographs Simon Hantaï and the Reserves of Painting
(Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020) and Penser la Peinture: Simon Hantaï ( Gallimard, 2012). She has written widely on modern and contemporary art for, among other journals, Artforum, Art in America, Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, Tate Papers, and Journal of Contemporary Painting, as well as for numerous exhibition catalogues. She has also edited four volumes for the Transatlantique collection (ER Publishing) on Martin Barré, Simon Hantaï, James Bishop, and Michel Parmentier. Currently, she is the director of the Clyfford Still Catalogue Raisonné Project at the Clyfford Still Museum.
Saul Ostrow, review of Alethiea, High Noon Gallery, New York. The Brooklyn Rail, February 2024
Though at first David Rhodes’ paintings appear to be reductive, repetitive and formulaic, with time one may come to the conclusion that his works are refreshingly deceptive in that he makes paintings that inform thought rather than ones that illustrate soundbites, or are displays of subjectivity, and taste.
For two decades, Rhodes’ paintings have consiste
d
ma
inly of ever-so slightly inflected black grounds articulated by raw canvas bands of varying widths and lengths.
This exhibition of recent works titled Alethiea
, follows suit. The press release accompanying this exhibition informs us that the title refers to a core concept of Martin Heidegger, and the term translates as “unconcealedness”, “disclosure”, “revealing”, or “unclosedness”. Aletheia is the Greek goddess of truth.
The press release goes on to describe Rhodes’ rigorous methodology as well as his many philosophical musings as to how Truth is a form of “disclosure” fundamentally accessed through one’s everyday existence, and the idea that time is an index of labor. Relative to the paintings presented here, we can only imagine that the title is meant to signal that these fields of matt black and their compositions of parallel lines that terminate in such a way as to indicate a vertical band running down the center of the canvas, are meant to be truthful and revelatory. From this, one may generate numerous analogous musings concerning the existential and phenomenological speculations embedded in Rhodes’ works.
Let’s suppose that Rhodes does put his philosophical reflections to use so as to manifest a “truth” —perhaps it is what Jacques Derrida identifies as the truth in painting — what is meant by this is: art with differing degrees of accuracy can call into question the varied ways that we understand the world—it can challenge our presumptions/assumptions. If this is true, then my first task as a viewer is to make sense of what is concretely presented to me and then as a critic to do so in a self-reflexive manner. In Rhodes’ case, as a viewer what I’m dealing with is various vertical rectangles of differing dimensions, upon which he has applied a black ground, now inscribed, after tape has been removed, with patterns of raw canvas stripes of differing widths and lengths. These lines do not align — as such Rhodes’ compositions are asymmetrical. Each painting is a variation of this format, what differs is the arrangement of the stripes — in the case of these, they abruptly terminate to indicate a vertical stripe. Optically, the patterns of stripes appear to shift as if they are at one moment both on the same plane and then on different ones. Occasionally, Rhodes lines give the illusion of cutting into this central boundary to form a silhouetted shape where previously there was only a pattern of stripes. As a result of the stark contrast, another effect is a secondary black retinal after-image of the stripes float before one’s eyes. As a critic what comes to mind is Bridget Riley’s early works: black lines appear to oscillate or pulsate, fooling viewers into seeing movement and change within what is a static painting. In doing so she demonstrates that vision is not neutral.
Continuing this dialog with my selves, we move on to the geometry of the black areas, which is determined by the asymmetrical patterns of the stripes that cut into them from the stretchers edge and abruptly terminate at an undemarcated vertical, which most often runs down the center of the canvas. The varied widths of the stripes are determined by the widths of the tape Rhodes uses to mask-off these unpainted areas of raw canvas. The pattern of these bands varying thicknesses do not appear to be systemically determined, but instead intuitive — perhaps they are determined by eye. The introduction of such an element is where Rhodes retains aspects of his pre-minimalist roots, in that while his work is pared down to a limited number of elements, it does not partake of minimalism’s essentialist logic and industrial (machine) aesthetic.
If this reading is correct, Rhodes permits himself to introduce into his reductive, rule oriented vocabulary, non-systemic variables as a repressed trace of his presence. From this it might be safe to conclude that Rhodes’ paintings are not only optical, or compositionally systemic but also indexical — and as a painter he is concerned with materiality, process, and the effects of shifts in scale. Therefore, countering what is taking place pictorially, his images stop at the edge of the stretcher bar — there are no drips, splatters or bleeds. To emphasize his paintings’ frontality the sides of the stretcher were apparently masked-off during painting. Another condition Rhodes acknowledges is that the thick weave of the canvas produces a slight bleeding along the stripes’ edges. Meanwhile, the mat black paint, which at first appears to be a continuous uninflected surface, reveals itself to be in actuality irregularly applied which becomes apparent as one moves about. Both of these chance elements — the bleed and the paint application disrupt what might otherwise give Rhodes’ paintings an industrial look. In this manner, though accepting the notion of repetition and variation as unavoidable, he resists the draw of standardization, and the Readymade.
What differentiates Rhodes’ paintings are his phenomenological and cognitive concerns– they are encountered as temporal events that require the viewer to actively filter out information and make conscious decisions so as to create a stable though not necessarily a singular, fixed image. Obviously, this complexity is not communicated in the photographic reproduction of Rhodes’ works which reduces them and replaces their variable surfaces with that of the paper or screen they are presented on. Likewise, by reducing them to an image of white stripes on a black ground, gone are the subtle bleeding of the edges and imperfections of the black ground. In this manner they are made decorative. This loss of the embodied real to its image — the displacement of the thing by its representation — is central to Walter Benjamin’s discourse on reproduction and Jean Baudrillard’s on the simulacrum. This long-fought battle to sustain the experiential dimension of art is another aspect of Rhodes’ works.
To my mind, Rhodes works are an assemblage of a number of forgotten, though once significant 1960s’ tendencies — the three most substantial are Systemic Painting, Art Concrete, and Op Art all of which provided components to what would become Minimalism. Given these sources, Rhodes’ works are neither nostalgic, derivative nor are they part of an endgame strategy, just the opposite. His is not some academic exercise or purist pursuit, instead it is a serious attempt to both sustain and expand upon the unfinished projects of his source materials. I raise this point about Rhodes’ sources because in this day and age, what abstract painting there is, is for the most part characterized by eclecticism, novelty, irony and despair. This state has been brought about by an ever more limited gene pool, and a lack of critical discourse. Rhodes works reminds us that there are paths to follow beyond those tendencies that result in Pop-ish mashups of quotes taken from the canon or assembled to nostalgically reproduce the look of the authentic. There are, as Rhodes’ works remind us, paths less taken, less opportunistic that are in the present marketplace less financially rewarding, though culturally much more significant than art brought into line with corporate standards.
Given the sources Rhodes deploys can’t be found by scrolling though Instagram and many of the art magazines from the 60-70s, cannot be found on-line it is important here to note some key moments in what I hold to be Rhodes’ minor history. I propose it includes the discourses concerning abstract painting that are part of post-1945 European modernism as well as such US exhibitions as Hard-edge Abstraction (1959) curated by Californian art critic Jules Langsner, Second-Generation Abstraction at the Jewish Museum(1963), William C. Seitz’s “The Responsive Eye”(1963) at the MoMA, Lawrence Alloway’s Systemic Painting (1966) at the Guggenheim and E.C. Goosen’s “Art of the Real” (1968) at MoMA. The developments in France, Italy and Germany, along with these now near forgotten curators, critics and historians and their exhibitions in the States were central to determining the course of abstract art in the 1960s, before Minimalism came to critical and art historical dominance, and thus creating the illusion that there were no other alternative approaches to be taken. Today, though not readily available, it is important to be aware that there are alternatives to the heritage of US modernist art history and reductivism formalism, which made abstract art in the main a formulaic and dead-ended pursuit.
Saul Ostrow was the editor of the book series Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture published by Routledge London and is the Art Editor at Large for Bomb Magazine. He was also Co-Editor of Lusitania Press from 1996 to 2004.)
Some ongoing citations and notes
But, when we have discovered in language an exceptional power of absence and of denial, we are tempted to consider the very absence of language as part of its essence, and silence as the ultimate possibility of speech. But this silence is in no respect the opposite of language, its repudiation or its condemnation; on the contrary, it is taken for granted by words—it is their preconceived basis, their secret intention; more yet, it is the only condition on which speech is possible, if speech is the replacement of a presence by an absence and the pursuit, through presences ever more fragile, of an absence ever more all-sufficing.
Maurice Blanchot Mallarmé and Language, 1947
Kafka’s works protected themselves against the deadly aesthetic error of equating the philosophy that an author pumps into a work with its metaphysical substance. Were this so, the work of art would be stillborn; it would exhaust itself in what it says and would not unfold itself in time. To guard against this short-circuit, which jumps directly to the significance intended by the work, the first rule is: take everything literally; cover up nothing with concepts invoked from above. Kafka’s authority is textual. Only fidelity to the letter, not oriented understanding, can be of help. In an art that is constantly obscuring and revoking itself, every determinate statement counter balances the general proviso of indeterminateness. Kafka sought to sabotage this rule when he let it be announced at one point that messages from the castle must not be taken ‘literally’.
Theodore W. Adorno Notes on Kafka, 1953
Stéphane Mallarmé’s text Un coup de dés (A Throw of the Dice): "Rien n'aura eu lieu que le lieu" The empty page, contingency.
Hölderlin's Nightsongs: In Holderlin’s vocabulary the word “night” often signifies that state of spiritual numbness which follows upon the death of the gods. A locus of loss, a gap between days, night is a time for remembering, a time for
waiting. Richard Sieburth
Between the Days an exhibition title of mine.
Blanchot's concept of a space that includes it's own absence, reserve, silence. A space away from the author or artist, a turning away in order to recognize it. Not a case of illustrating this space but producing it. Michel Parmentier was very involved with this thinking of Blanchot's. In my first serious paintings are from the 1970s when, as a student, I used horizontal bands of contrasting value, black enamel and white oil color, I had no awareness of Parmentier's 1960s work.
Paintings are radical because of what they are, not what they try to say. The desire to make a painting is the starting point, painting is its own impetus.
The comportment of artworks reflects the violence and domination of empirical reality by more than analogy. Adorno.
Arthur Rimbaud's extraordinary simplicity, disjunctive, undecidable mystery in a literal and non symbolic form, "I wanted to say what it said, literally and in all its senses."
Painting is not confined or ultimately determined by concept: the problem is that of philosophy, bound to the word, when transferred directly to speaking of painting.
Making paintings today, to quote Jean‐Luc Nancy “...allows for a circulation of recognitions, identifications, feelings, but without fixing them in a final signification.”
Freud, and Marx both recognized that illusion was constitutive of our social existence, and not only an error of reasoning—they looked for material experience.
Constitutive of community is an unbreachable gap or caesura between people, said Jean-Luc Nancy.
Nothingness, silence, the spaces between. The black spaces, the light of black. Around figures in portraits by Velazquez, Manet and others, black.
The concrete is complex in our everyday encounters. Tangible and sensuous material via touch as well as sight, makes painting a material consciousness.
The conflicts of history erupt into art differently: paradox and fragmentation.
"De facto, according to Michel Foucault, Klee, "makes the very act of painting the deployed, scintillating knowledge of painting itself." By leaving part of the ground intact, the artist succeeds in representing the mediums intrinsic qualities by its absence. (Angela Lampe, on Paul Klee)
Klee talked of an "in-finite genesis."
Martin Heidegger in his notes on Klee exempts him from a dependence on metaphysics. Klee's works are "no longer merely eidos" are "not images but states." The relation between "work" and "on-looker" is essential for Heidegger, as they are constitutive components. The "tuning as the joining-stirring, folding-unfolding..."
Presencing-absencing.
Klee, Cézanne and East Asian art for Heidegger offer a space granting "nothing" and not a representation.
I choose to work within the medial constraints of paint and canvas; black paint and raw canvas.
Matisse: "Black is not only a color but also a light."
Kafka: "One must write into the dark." In Kafka's writing the prose surface is not complex or puzzling, it is the simplicity of it that's puzzling. Emotion or thought are form, and visa versa, here they are not distinguishable.
"Once Newton's perfect mechanical universe has fallen apart, Matisse represents space by occupying it rhythmically, a sign after another, like walking, one step after another." Giorgio Griffa
Tactility of color, and a reserve of exposed canvas surface, are vital to my paintings—aspects that are also present in Matisse's and Picasso's paintings and significantly, Cézanne's paintings before them. More recent painters that are involved in this: Barré, Bishop, Bonnefoi, Degottex, Hantaï, Rouan, and Parmentier. Not collage or monochrome as a solution, this was also true of Pollock, Matisse and Picasso.
The ground/support of my paintings is shown: canvas. The figure and ground is not a consolidated binary opposition, they are dynamic and interchange.
My paintings are iterative, retrospectively it is possible to see what wouldn't be possible to see before.
There is a material rather than psychic automatism at play in my paintings.
Lines, drawn with tape and over painted black are removed to reveal the substrate of canvas. This is drawing as painting: absent or negative lines, blind painting, and seen only later after making.
The earliest marks or drawing were scratches on a cave wall (Vilém Flusser on gesture). Today this still exists: inscribing walls, as graffiti, incised drawing into painting or etching lines in printmaking.
Mondrian's use of tape in his late paintings, rather than choosing to paint directly.
Hantaï's retained areas of raw canvas in his paintings, working blind.
After leaving art school and living in London, I made paintings by folding canvas, by drawing through paint with my finger, now the folding is visual and the line that still exposes the substrata is by tape removed.
The process of my painting is blind, as a consequence of my way of using tape I am not able to see the painting that will result. Matisse didn't look at his drawing as he worked, Pollock was in and often on his painting and not away from the surface as he worked, Hantaï used pliage (folding) not seeing the final results of his painting as he painted. The ordinary tape I use bleeds, and so does not leave a perfect edge.
Samuel Beckett in a letter to Hans Naumann on using French rather than his native English, "I will all the same give you one clue: the need to be ill equipped."
The visceral is comprehended, but not possessed, through a bodily connection.
In a quarry outside of Rome, Robert Smithson poured a truckload of hot black asphalt down a slope, a work he called Asphalt Rundown (1969). Some earlier works of mine remember this piece.
I am also interested in paintings material facticity of both surface and actual depth as two-dimensional pictoriality, an exploration into the conditions of painting.
Lorca said that, "All that had black sounds has duende." Cante jondo is a form of Flamenco, "owing to its narrow melodic range and repetitive use of the same note, it gives the impression of prosa cantada: sung prose—the "breaks" are the "metrical rhythm." In Poem of the Cante Jondo, the rhythm is continually broken, then set in motion
As Michel Foucault has pointed out in his essay "Hölderlin et le
"non' du père," it is specious to assume that these texts can be explained away as the effects of a discrete series of biographical causes; if anything, they serve to illuminate the very discontinuities that define the problematic relation of life to work, madness to poetry, events to words.
One of the most salient tropes of Hölderlin's mature work therefore involves the way in which man responds to the blinding day of the gods by reverting to the shelter of night:
But someone reach me
A fragrant cupful Of dark light, that
I might rest; it would be sweet
To drowse in the shade. ("Remembrance")
...highest moment of tragic emotion (Hölderlin uses the French term transport) to the role of caesura in prosody: both define a space in between, an "antirhythmic suspension" of temporal progres-sion, an interval of silence in which the "pure Word" may appear. In this hiatus man and god couple and come asunder, taking distance on each other by the very paradox of their coupling. Richard Sieburth on Hölderlin
"...between poetry's temporal and spatial expanse—by insisting that poetry, scored and scanned upon a page, is fundamentally both architecture and noise." Jennifer Scappettonne on Amelia Rosselli.
"I tend toward the elimination of the I. The I is no longer the expressive centre, it is placed in the shadows or to the side." Rosselli. Subjectivity is in flux, split, plural in I/thou.
From "A Note on Amelia Rosselli" by Pier Paolo Pasolini: "One of the most clamorous cases of Amelia Rosselli's linguistic connectives is the lapsus, or slip. At times feigned, at times true: but when it is feigned, it is probably so in the sense that, having been formed spontaneously, it is immediately accepted, adopted, fixed by the author under the aesthetic species of an "invention that makes itself." Passollini goes on to say "as if born outside the mind, almost a physical projection of rationally inexpressible..."
The appearence and disappearence of figures, things, around the subjects of Velázquez's paintings, and the blacks that absorb light whilst also always radiating light. The rectangles of black, luminous, infinite depths. Not a window, a place, continuous.
Cézanne's motif was not stable: he painted on-site where he saw his motif as a dynamic event. His paintings are not static constructions, but combinations of movement and duration, inviting sustained attention rather than a casual passing of time: much as music can do. There is rhythm and flattening, a mosaic, and the distortion of shape that recalls Byzantine painting. The situating of a figure, foreground, and a background, space, is interchangeable, side by side, things and that which is usually understood as in-between do not sit in a fixed relation.
Parataxis.
It is vital to stand in front of paintings to experience this.
The non-rational intrudes into the structure of painting, as it does into reality, as Pythagoras saw in numbers (the square route of two).
In my painting it is irregularity: inconstancy, randomness and chance present in multiplied discontinuities and asymmetries.
I retain both allurement and effacement within my paintings finding different ambiguities: figure/ground, emptiness/fullness, symmetry/asymmetry, static/dynamic. Typically now, a vertical and central section oscillates or vibrates adjacent to opposing diagonal lines. When this is blank it continues to be visually unstable but in a different way. Now it is a ceasura, not a static shape, and a counterpoint to the articulated sides, it appears and disappears in a state of change. Uncertainty occurs in the lack of finality—a dynamic instability can be another kind of stillness. I see my paintings as impure, paradoxical, sensuous and matter of fact. They have randomness, muteness, silence. The means and process of painting are as important as composition for the finished painting. Whatever is there communicates in a painting rather than through a painting.
I remove myself from the paintings, though this is never intended to be complete—distancing self-expression, symbolic narratives, or metaphoric readings. I'm not interested in subjectivism and psychologism as such.
I'm against the use of painting as more instrumental rationality; evident contradictions and absurdity are accepted, and valued.
In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot waiting is the repeated and continual deferral of meaning—the painfully repetitive and bleakly humorous condition of our lives, is not without its own unintentional beauty.
The use of one colour, black, is a concentration of colour, it introduces the absence of other colors, a yearning.
"I would prefer not to." As Melville's Bartleby said.
All marks or graphisms, even ruled lines, are gesture.
The taped lines are like stencils, they leave a negative line, they are an empreinte.
"We other we deal with the negative." Kafka.
The disjunctive internal division recalls reflections: mirrors or the surface of water, the external edge of the painting is yet another interruption. The two breaks emphasize inside and outside.
The rupture of the connection is the connection (Derrida). Yves-Alan Bois notes that an interruption is temporal.
Anton Webern's 5 Movements for String Quartet Op. 5 uses combinations and contrasts between basic musical elements: textures, chords, held notes; in this music, the playing technique and the sound color is as or more important as the pitches. The form is clear and simple, the differences between musical elements straightforward, the polyphony is clear. Every harmony in a piece around this time of early, free atonal phase of Webern, has a relationship to a tonal center—but one that isn't heard, a "suspended center." Pieces became shorter and more condensed, concentrated to the point where in 3 Little Pieces for Piano Op. 6 every second is filled with intensity. Like Arnold Schonberg's last part of 3 Little Pieces for Cello and Piano, Op.19 (1914), also music with emotion, written after Schoenberg heard of the death of Gustav Mahler.
A painting crystallizes in the suspended moment that I stop, the painting continues from there. Everything is on or in the surface. Nothing is held back within the language limit, and nothing is embellished. The painting is there, the viewer also feels being there; in this one to one; work and on-looker.
Translation is an interesting subject in the reception of painting. Painting offers direct physical experience, and thoughtful engagement, dialogue. Thinking is poetizing: "primordial poetry" Heidegger.
The centric axial section of my paintings may elicit identification anthropomorphically, though this is also effaced as this area is blank, or in a counter direction: a radical caesura, in tension with each side. Hence mimesis is negated, and with it the promise of identification is effaced.
Disjunction across and between the vertical sections is like the difference between Kairological and Chronological time; the transitions are disruptive, active, particular, and not homogeneous, predictable and leveled out. The concrete particularities of the oblique lines, their uneven edges and exposed canvas are in contrast to the initial perception of an expanse of black surface, a gesture of writing that is not constructive, but rather disruptive and penetrating (From the Greek graphein which means both scraping or scratching and to write about something).
Rather than following the anterior narrative obsession by which paintings become belated illustrations George Didi-Hubermann refers to the term dialectic (dialectical image) to suggest a way to think of painting away from a positivistic interpretation that implies that through knowledge all will be clear and decipherable; he is considering the opposite, meaning that we relinquish our grasp of the image/painting in order to allow the image/painting to lead us.
The nouveau roman, and French cinema focus on the non-teleological repetition of details without the usual conventional plot structure exploring the nature of experience, and the processes of thought. Godard's editing, the musicality of his films structure, the cuts.
the role of caesura in prosody: both define a space in between, an "antirhythmic suspension" of temporal progres-sion, an interval of silence in which the "pure Word" may appear.
Hubert Damisch on Dubuffet, "...he liked to work in the thickness of the ground—I mean the tableaux—to revel what is beneath." Hans Hartung worked in the thickness of the surface, informed by his experience of printmaking.
Jannis Kounellis knew that the objective immediacy of bodily immanence is unsustainable, meaning cannot be fully realized this way, this very difficulty attains a sense of mourning in itself. And, despite the impossibility of the modernist project and because the work is connected to the past at the same time as the present a utopic impulse remains, without an available explanation.
It can be that an artist does not reflect the preoccupations of the time, as Yves Bonnefoy described Giacometti. Rather this work can look to origins without being at all outmoded. Think also of other fields: Heidegger, or Louis Kahn, for example. Both looking back, and beyond linguistic expression, as Heidegger found in his Contributions to Philosophy.
Wittgenstein noted that color couldn't be defined, it was dependent on social and cultural circumstance and too fugitive for words that are themselves signs that didn't offer any direct correspondence.
The ensuing absence, Mallarme, and silence, Blanchot.
I think of what painting can be. I’m not interested in dogmas of either geometrical abstraction or color theory; negativity in my desire for a different way to beauty or sublimity is fine.
Any understandings of painting happens over time, and with other people, in a kind of community.
I approach painting, I don’t say I know already what it is. The function of painting is to pose questions about our being and our desires, it embodies our orientations in life and it evinces a fragmentary subjectivity possessed by doubt.
There is a "posthumous maturation" to cite Walter Benjamin: an ongoing change from viewing to reviewing paintings over time, in our contemporaneous experience and historically. My paintings are neither purely structural nor idealistic. They are not a demonstration of a unique skill. The making is apprehended easily but the viewing involves ambiguation: there is a constant unfolding rather than arrival at a destination.
Mallarmé’s poems and Klee’s paintings are machines that generate form and meaning—finding what was not there before; produced, in the Greek sense, and not created, in the Thomist theological sense.
Heidegger's translation of the Anaximander Fragment is against the profound loss caused by imposed presuppositions in previous translations, the imposition of interpretation is fraught with difficulties, even remembering that a definitive interpretation isn't possible. Translation is a fundamental quality in all communication.
Hölderlin's translations of Pindar, a new language "always circling the abyss." Benjamin.
Benjamin proposes that language is already a translation of the language of things.
I don't expect my paintings ever to be immediately intelligible, anyway art is indemonstrable. The more or less abrupt transitions and repetitions in my paintings might be indicative of paintings increasing uncertainty over its place in the world, not to mention our own, but I don't set out to demonstrate this. Louis Khan's buidings are very important to me, they focus being, becoming, unconcealing. They unfold in experience, in time as architecture They connect us to what is common in us as human-beings: they are places, social places of community and also silence and contemplation. Artists are people in society, how they function or think of themselves is complicated by the global economies that they exist within, there are writers who have and continue to illuminate our experiences of politics society, for me: Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt, Paulo Virno, Cornelius Castoriadis.
David Rhodes
Other texts
Galeria Carles Taché, Barcelona, 2021
David Rhodes' pictorial language limits itself to several technical elements repeated by the artist in each painting he creates. Vertical lines of different widths reveal nuances of the canvas surface. The limitation to black paint and the colour of the canvas or paper responds to an intent to mediate the process of painting without the distraction of multitudes of color with an expression at once economical and urgent.
Just so, through repetition, and structure, the eye aroused by incidents can abandon the quick glance and thus concentrate on the perception of details and how they correspond and crystalize differently. Then one can begin apprehending the rhythmic, formal, particular differences between the paintings. The precision, and openness in Rhodes' technical process reveals contingency.
María Pfaff, gallery text, New Paintings at Tat Art Barcelona (Galeria Carles Taché), Barcelona, 2017
The way the artist chose to title the exhibition says a lot about the nature of his body of work, a whole that can be seen as a never-ending and unique series of paintings that paradoxically make diversity arise through repetition. These new paintings are thus organically connected with their precedents. It is not that the artist searches only for simplicity, on the contrary, he also intends to intensify complexity, not in an expansive way but rather within narrow margins. Rhodes has determined these margins by establishing language limits: he paints black on raw canvas, or paper, and composes with vertical lines. Starting from these premises, the outcomes are unexpected: paintings next to each other reveal formal and affective differences.
Vertical lines show different widths and inclinations while the applied paint amplifies the presence of the canvas surface. The concept of the variation helps to understand each individual painting as also a part of something larger, a common harmonic pattern that naturally connects one painting to another and so on. Time is a magnitude that becomes necessary for the apprehension of these works that are apparently simple both in process and result. A slow glance at Rhodes` works proves how this extreme economical expression can suddenly create fluctuations and rhythms.
David Cohen, Schwarzwälde at Hionas Gallery, Artcritical, New York, 2013
The range of effects and the nuances of affect presented by the paintings of David Rhodes would be remarkable enough in an artist who set himself few restraints. And yet – initially at least – the defining characteristic of this New York debut exhibition of the Berlin-based British painter is the stringency and starkness of its pictorial system.
On raw canvases that follow the same tripartite division, in a deadpan application of one acrylic black, Rhodes arranges three sets of parallel stripes. These vary considerably in thickness but – in the painting process – the black is clearly worked against strips of masking tape of maybe just two or three widths. And as (rather like a woodcut) it is the exposed raw canvas rather than the acrylic strokes that registers as the signifying stripe.
Reading from left to right, the three sets go top left to bottom right, back to top right, down to bottom right. In one or two paintings of sparse population and thin exposed stripe we can almost read “VA” allowing for the absence of the A’s crossbar and the doubling of its and the V’s shared inner diagonal. But generally his hieroglyph eludes the Latin alphabet, while seeming alphabet-like – a kind of semiotic reverse, in this respect, of Al Held’s Alphabet series, seen last spring at Cheim & Read.
Art historically the most striking resemblance is to Frank Stella of the period of The Marriage of Reason and Squalor although, again topically, the early grid works of Sean Scully (on view at the Drawing Center) are another apt point of reference. Rhodes actually occupies expressive territory closer to the later works of both those artists while retaining the formal rigor of their earlier efforts. Thinking about him this way helps us locate his “minimalism” as proto, or post, in the sense that the restraints of his system serve emotional rather than purely cerebral ends. His art is one of economy rather than reduction per se (is modernist not minimalist as some might put it).
There is unmistakable warmth to the paintings, despite their pared-down qualities. This results from what could be dismissed as studio contingencies and yet feels intentional, possibly even integral. Tolerated rub and burr lend surfaces the feel of (again) woodcut despite the undisguised materiality of canvas and absented tape. But even if Rhodes were able to program a Roxy Paine-like robot to dispatch his paintings for him, several ensuing perceptual phenomena would continue to enrich – to mitigate and complicate – his streamlined modus operandi.
There is the effect, for instance, of proximate bands of black triggering retinal sensations of other colors so that in one painting there might seem to be alternating black and blue. Then there are the disconcerting twists and tapers, in multiple possibilities, where one set of diagonals jar with another in what New Yorkers might want to call the Flatiron effect. The differing canvas sizes seen in the close quarters of Hionas’s Lower East Side gallery and the inclusion in the back room of a couple of works on paper bring home the crucial variables of scale and support in determining the impact of this reduced vocabulary. There is a lot that can be said within strict adherence to a format.
It’s instructive to compare Rhodes with fellow Brit Ian Davenport whose current show of sumptuous stripes at Paul Kasmin is itself fortuitously timed with Ameringer McEnery Yohe’s overview of the perennially scintillating Gene Davis. Davenport juxtaposes skillfully held-in-check chromatic brilliance with the flourish of exuberantly unpredictable puddles in what nonetheless seem like exquisitely orchestrated marbling as the paint oozes out of his pipes of color. Returning to Rhodes, after this over the top pop, is rather like listening to Bach violin sonatas after a Baroque opera. But as with Bach, you soon hear as many voices and as much emotion.
Bret Baker, Painters Table, New York, 2013
David Rhodes’ exhibition Schwarzwälde at Hionas Gallery on the Lower East Side is a potent reminder that paintings are invitations to reflect and, at their best, transcend their own means.
At first glance, Rhodes’ paintings are darkly hermetic. Their minimalist clarity and completeness are forbidding, and the viewer cannot find a point of entry. Indeed, Rhodes’ canvases seem to shout Stella’s dictum “what you see is what you see.” Yet, after a few moments, they suddenly open outward.
Using a severely limited vocabulary - raw canvas, thinly stained black acrylic paint, and carefully taped edges - Rhodes creates an unbounded experience. His paintings are full of nuanced perception and keenly invoke of the legacy of modernism.
Rhodes’ paintings embody minimalism’s factuality, and evoke the existentialism of the New York School. The fractured unity of each composition recalls Cubism. All this Rhodes accomplishes without forgoing image - perceiving a forest, here, is a leap, but not a big one. The paintings’ kinetic effect is similar to that of moving through deeply wooded space - close, dark forms passing in and out of one’s field of focus.
Berlin-based Rhodes doesn’t reference just any forest, however, he chooses der Schwarzwald, the Black Forest. A place of legend, the Black Forest beckons to the intrepid, not the faint of heart. Within, unknown dangers lurk, but also untold treasures; it is a place of realized visions, of magic. Perhaps the most potent reading of Rhodes’ recent work is a symbolist one. In his hands, the language of late modernism does not celebrate a definitive aesthetic; rather, it suggests the possibilities of painting. With minimal means, Rhodes paints a total experience - both the forest and the trees lie in wait for the viewer.
Barbara Buchmaier, Zeit-Zeichen (Time Signs) extract from a catalogue text, Berlin, 2005
Some of the paintings, especially the more minimal paper works can seem like preliminary designs or sketches, however, these works are complete: though they are conceivably unfinished in the sense that they can be potentially expanded in different directions. Therefore all that is fixed or finished is a current state: one possible moment. With prolonged viewing, and without excluding an iconographic reading, spatial and topological modulations and velocities now interchange.
Sherman Sam, extract from solo exhibition catalogue, Vis-a-Vis, Palacete Viscondes de Balsemao, Porto, 2005
The lines created by brush certainly are the mark or extension of his hand and thus his body; Jackson Pollock's drips are probably the most prominent example of this notion of "embodiment." It is an interpretation inspired by Merleau-Ponty who's idea that our relation to the world is always via the body, that is "the insertion of the mind in corporeality." Hence his philosophy, and in particular his writings on painting, bring us back to our corporeal existence. The critic Mark Ginsbourne has written of Rhodes' painting in terms of the haptic, specifically, he has described Rhodes' work as being as "concerned with configured space and surface boundaries, a consideration and questioning as to how we frame our perceptions." This work is not in any way a simple reevaluation of post-painterly abstraction, rather it is also preoccupied with an exploration of such interests as the distinctions of structure and timbre in music: Morton Feldman and John Cage as well and J.S. Bach. Like Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko or Blinky Palermo, it is a felt art where passions and thinking are disseminated through formal structures. As much as politics and pathos can be discussed through representation—painting and particularly abstract painting can solicit "joyance" to use Jacques Derrida's term.