Selected reviews, interviews and text

Saul Ostrow, review of Eletheia, 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 consisted mainly of ever-so slightly inflected black grounds articulated by raw canvas bands of varying widths and lengths. This exhibition of recent works titled Aletheia, 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 mat 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, each covered in a substratum of canvas upon which he has applied a mottled black ground inscribed 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 Benjamín’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.

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, employ the techniques of color field painting, 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.

An unpublished interview by Monica Pavese (excerpts) Rome 2022

Monica Pavese: What is your background?

David Rhodes: I’m from a working-class family in Manchester, an industrial city in the North West of England. I was a twin, the other child died soon after I was born. My Mother had mental health struggles, and I didn’t discover for sure that she was Jewish until much later in my life even though clues were there. She worked in the clothing trade, she was a buyer for a big department store in the city. I guess I may have inherited a sensitivity to fabric and surface texture from her: tactility, folding, pattern etc. I liked French 19th century artists and poets at school, but thought they were all form a social class that had nothing to do with me, even though Baudelaire and Rimbaud certainly explored society’s regions outside the drawing room salon and certainly I loved reading their poetry. I didn’t have exposure to actual paintings when a young teenager, though in the school art store room there was a large reproduction of Paul Cézanne's Self Portrait with Palette (1890) in the Kustmuseum Basel that started a life long interest in Cézanne. I was very aware that both my father and grandfather had spent their respective teenage years at war in combat, in stark contrast to my own. As a teenager, I saw Bertolt Brecht performed in Manchester and made trips down to Stratford to see Shakespeare. I saw the same play more than once in the same season on several occasions, the differences between the performances made a big impression on me, once I had experienced this I wanted to see it again and again. Quite a few years later in the mid 1990s I saw Peter Stein's Russian production of Aeschylus' Orestia in Edinburgh, during intervals the set was repositioned and repainted by the performers, visually the work was explicit in its making. Other journeys, The National Gallery and Tate Gallery in London, The Louvre in Paris, were made but not so much contemporary art. Rothko's Seagram paintings at the Tate were extraordinary to encounter. in their own room. I became interested in Early Italian, Medieval art, Velasquez, Picasso, Matisse, Klee, Miró. And, one day Mondrian, I had walked past the Tate’s Mondrian’s a couple of times but then on one occasion the paintings were such a compelling experience that I walked into a gallery bench while looking at them.

MP: How was traveling important for you then and later?

DR: The sound of musical instruments or voices, the timbre in music, chamber music, flamenco, Neapolitan folk, Ragas, jazz have always been important and some of this music I discovered while traveling, it corresponded to how I was beginning to think of a painted surface in paintings. Throughout southern Europe the houses were painted in colors on an obviously tactile, rendered or brick surface. I experienced a lot of European modern architecture, both that of regional post war cities and the conspicuous works of, for an example: Le Corbusier in France. Materials, surfaces, scale, spaces, transitions, all very exciting to discover. Early travel took me to France, Germany, Italy, Spain. In a small town outside of Cadiz, I was down there because of a poet, this time Lorca. The train ride to the coast was through flats that during the day were bleached out by intense sunlight, but on returning in the evening the strips of water were silver threaded through the flat landscape, and the land was very dark and resonant. This reversal of contrast and light has always stayed with me. On the train down from Madrid, after the astonishment of seeing Velasquez and Ribera at the Prado and huge hand painted bill boards in the streets, the train stopped at a bonfire in the fields and passengers got off the train for drinks and conversation. On the train were Gypsies sleeping in the areas between cars, one young child held out his cupped hands, they contained a small bird. Andalusia was in the late 1970s singular experience of traveling in Europe, the presence of Caliphate Spain was tangible, evident in so many ways. I saw some Flamenco on the edge of town in Seville, also memorable, a visceral sound:voices, hand claps, feet stamping, guitar used also as percussion. I spent time in Cologne, I was supposed to be heading directly to the South of France but got diverted, met a girl from there who talked about Marx and how her parents and their friends were all still Nazi’s, it was interesting. I've often returned to Naples, the Museo archeologico Napoli, made a strong impression on me.

MP: Where did you study after leaving Manchester?

DR: I chose to study in Bristol, rather than London, where I knew I would have to move eventually, because of several reasons. Hassel Smith was teaching there. And Paul Feiler, together with other artists teaching that were connected to the painters in the west of England that knew artists such as Naum Gabo and Mark Rothko. I wasn’t interested in current British painting so much. The artists who produced Artscribe were also visiting the school to teach, they were travelling to New York and so I heard about Brice Marden and his studio routines for example. Hassel was a great teacher, very direct, and spoke as an artist and from his experience, he had been a close friend of Clifford Still. During the summers I spent time in France, Italy, Spain seeing museums and galleries, architecture and just traveling through these countries. I was making paintings around 6 x 5 feet with horizontal bars of black and white, or white and white, or red and white, alternating artist and enamel paints. Before this I had a year of using resin or latex on canvas strips woven horizontally on a painting stretcher. I was aware of the Arte Povera artists, Fontana, Burri, and Kounellis. Also, Pollock and his use of enamel paint, and black. At a certain point I started using the library for part of each day as I realized I needed to know a lot more than I did. Looking back I could see what I was missing, there were artists I would have loved to be aware of as a student, Hantaï, Parmentier and Hartung for example but I had no knowledge of them. My paintings were making themselves after I had established very simple structures, a frankness in the use of material was already a very significant part of the way I was thinking about painting, the support was never a passive and neutral for me and surface was necessarily granular and close, and I associated it with timbre in music. I couldn’t anticipate exactly what the paintings would look like when they were finished. Chance already interested me, I appreciated Cage and dance that used ordinary rather than balletic movement. I was never in complete control of my paintings or interested in that, the difference between the method of painting, always very simple and the finished painting surprised me, it still does: the pictorial complexity seemed independent of my particular skills. I was listening to Bach, Schoenberg, Webern, Neapolitan traditional, Ragas, Flamenco, jazz, particularly Dolphy and Miles.

MP: And after art school you have lived in different cities in different countries?

DR: Yes, after art school and a stay in Paris where I was spending as much time in museums as possible, I moved to London. I was increasingly aware that painting, in particular abstract painting, was disparaged, and at the same time painting was lacking a serious critical discourse. I was fortunate in getting a gift of a small group of books by authors including Bataille, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes and Foucault by a printer I was assisting with to earn some money, he had just finished an evening philosophy course. Early 1980s, before Thatcher’s revolution gained traction and finance flowed into the city, still in some ways the world of post war neglect and the 60s exchange between criminal and aristocrat factions mixing in their city. The connection to past decades, and the number of central areas of London available for affordable living reminded me of the Berlin I lived in through the early 2000s. London is nothing like that these days. I remember meeting artists such as Frank Bowling and Anthony Caro who were connected to the American scene, there was no feeling of connections to the rest of Europe. I was able to live in Venice and work at the Biennale for three consecutive years 95 to 97. Having many months in this city, moving around it, getting to know the paintings in collections and churches there, a very important experience for me. I was making large paintings on the floor by folding canvas after pouring paint onto the surface, I couldn’t see the result until pulling the canvas back, I was painting blind. I worked on paper like this too, a lot of different blacks, whites and greys. After this I made small paintings on aluminum, using a finger to draw though a layer of wet paint in a circular motion with my eyes closed. This was in the 80s and through the beginning of the 90s. By the end of the 90s I was extending my arm and painting loops of different colors on canvas, after arriving in Berlin I started using only black and repeated diagonals to form chevrons and then diagonals that alternated along at least two vertical divisions, doubling and interlocking of the chevron. I lived in Mitte which was part of the former DDR, it was the center of pre second world war Berlin. I lived in three different apartments there Linienstraße, Kline Hamburgerstraße and Gipsstraße. I felt very well living in this neighborhood, I liked its streets, and its centrality to the city, I went everywhere by bike. Finally, I had some years in a 3,500 sq.ft. loft just off the Landwehrkanal near Maybachufer on Shinkestraße where I lived and worked. This was a floor of a former factory, 15 foot ceilings made with curved brick sections supported by grey steel columns and beams and a terracotta tile floor. I travelled a lot around Europe, once to North Africa and made regular trips to New York. American artists coming to Berlin would look me up, Joane Greenbaum, Amy Sillman, Marina Adams, Stanley Whitney among others. I also had visits from John Yau a couple of times. Berlin in these years was very other to mainstream European cities or New York, it was a very different place to be. I had time to work, and read a lot, Mandelstam and Célan closely, Kafka, Beckett. I was in Berlin for 10 years, after which I spent a year mostly in Barcelona, but I also did some teaching in Marseille. After this, since 2014 I have been living and working in New York.

Mary Jones interview for Artcritical 2016, excerpts: 

The works are bold and diagrammatic, at once elegant and urgent. Black acrylic paint is applied directly to raw canvas, which is still visible in thin, vertical, skewed lines that slice through the black surface with an intense rhythmic pitch. Reflections, folds, and mirrors may all come to mind, but the compositions are held in tension against any possible convergences, simple readings or symmetry. They reverberate with the particular beauty inherent to clarity spurred to adventurous action.

Mary Jones: You’ve titled your show “Between the Days,” which is the also title of one of the paintings, the others remaining untitled, with the date and city of completion titled with every painting. What’s the reference?

DAVID RHODES: The title refers to a particular idea of passage or contingency. It is simply that the passages from one day to another are irregular, and that this is neither even, nor homogeneous—this passage is not a singular, chronological meter. The rhythm one feels, it's speed, be it irregular or not, also haunts my paintings. My paintings are finished when the paint has dried, usually taking one day to make, alla prima. Although the paintings aren’t about that specific day and place, they are subject to circumstances, and have associations for me. Because I've been so peripatetic, it has enabled marking a place and time in my own life, as well as acknowledging experienced time's inconsistencies and odd recurrences. Walter Benjamin's idea of "posthumous maturation," Marcel Proust's "involuntary memory" and Henri Bergson's "irrepressible" alternative durations—all state an alterity and an estrangement from one directional, chronological time. My paintings have a structure and process that reappears, there's not a singular evolution, rather, many moments of recursion. 

MJ: How is scale changing your work?

DR: It hasn't changed the composition or paint application. It does change the reception of a painting as well as presenting physical challenges in the making of it. It obviously alters the way we relate to a painting. It’s also a different kind of intimacy. When a larger surface is present we are able to move toward it and feel both within it perceptually and related to it bodily. Rothko said that the ideal viewing distance for his paintings was around 18 inches. For me a relation to the architecture of any give space is important when considering an exhibition and that relation changes with the size of the paintings. Even small paintings have this clear external relationship to each particular space in which they are exhibited. My paintings can often be inverted, having in many instances two vertical orientations. The internal compositional relations are direct and spare, in music I think of, for example, the compositions of Arnold Schoenberg or J.S. Bach, both of whom use musical inversion and isomorphic partition. Each panel is also a passage to and from an edge or mute internal fissure that is never completely contained or cut off. This is a break and also a connection—the silence between mutual attraction and enmity, take Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville, the scene in which two characters are separated from each other, and connected, by an open door. Godard's constant contradictions and paradox, the jump-cuts, disjunctive images, music and text, all important for me. Also, Matisse's 'Window at Couliere,' the vertical divisions of surface and space, and particularly the black, vertical ceasura, or Giacometti's isolated standing figures articulated by incisions: incursions from the surrounding space.

MJ: Could you describe your process?

DR: The process of making is in how the paintings appear, they are very accessible visually. The degree of given structure allows for chance, and controlled spontaneity. The movement of the painting is something like that in dance, walking or posture, in the way it leans and unfolds rhythmically. Lines are taped in each section successively, each section made consecutively. The lines are several different widths, and always oriented other than at 90 degrees. In each section, from one to the next, the direction of the lines reverses. Between each section of the painting the seam is visible as in a textile or an architectural section. Some examples of a seam in architecture are the sectional structures of Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, the abutted sheet marble of Mies van de Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion and the concrete shuttering marks in the pilotis of Le Corbusier's Unite L'Habitation in Marseille. The paintings are made from left to right, although there are exceptions. After each section is painted the tape is removed and the next section started. There’s no planning it all out beforehand, no editing or smoothing out, it’s a question of any relationships and constellations appearing: including dislocation, inconsistency and dissonance. The appearance of my paintings is the direct consequence of the materials that I choose to work with. My thoughts are inscribed in the surface of my paintings.

MJ: The color black has so many connotations; urban life and industrialisation, as well as transcendence and negation. Are you using black metaphorically?

DR: The viewer will project what they will, and that’s fine, for me black is not primarily meta, I don't have a fixed idea for it, it can be viewed as elemental or also as a potential. Before these paintings I was using a full range of colour, and I felt the relationships that colour offered were such a subject in itself that I wanted to work in a way in which a colour wasn’t about its constantly various relationship to other colours, but rather in fact with their absence. I'm interested in the monochromaticism of far eastern art, Chinese ink paintings for example, where black isn't used against or in a rejection of color but always in relation to absent color. I'm interested in the aesthetic of Kakuzo Okakura's Book of Tea and aspects of Japanese Noh Theatre. Black and Red figure krater painting of 6th and 5th century BCE Greece has long interested me. Jannis Kounellis used black in an elemental way in his paintings and sculptures, combining everyday materials such as coal or sackcloth. This elemental directness is a contemporaneity that does not exclude historicity. I can identify with this approach it's both Arte Povera and historical enfolding in simultaneity.

MJ: Kasimir Malevich formulated the black square to signify an absolute rejection of any possibilities for pictorial representation in favor of pure expression. Do you identify with this kind of abstraction?

DR: My paintings have different parts in relation to each other, but they're not propositional, and I'm not looking to replace one thing with another as a representation. Associations outside the paintings are inevitable, I'm neither dissuading nor encouraging this.

MJ: Can you describe this further?

I feel as if I follow the paintings as they are both made and later, retrospectively in deciding how to continue or not in the next painting. They do not describe ideas that I have a priori, or illustrate something specifically that I manifest through painting. They’re not an expression of my ego. I find the paintings of interest so I make more, I consider how I am thinking and feeling about them They are in connected of course to my thinking, what they are is always a little out of reach for me. I think of Beckett, or Kafka, what they were doing was not contrived to fit a model they had already determined. To be painting is, or at least can be, a vital counter to the passive consuming of leisure time and entertainment. I want my paintings to have a connection and resonance with the day-to-day world as it is experienced or recalled. Of course, I always want my work to explore painting itself.

MJ: Is it important to you that there be a feeling of urgency in your work?

DR: Perhaps without desire the paintings would be decorative in an uninteresting way, the urgency isn't consciously imposed. 

MJ: The surfaces of your paintings are very straightforward, there’s no enhancement. It’s a surface that identifies with its elements; it doesn’t transcend its materials, it underscores them. Is this in the service of immediacy?

DR: It’s a very specific surface, neither stained nor layered, it’s somewhere in-between. It’s a resistant kind of surface, not so inviting but also seductive paradoxically. My paintings don’t have an overt element of craft. They’re unpretentious, painted like a wall. Think of Arte Povera: Burri, Fontana, Griffa or Kounellis for example. This directness also embodies the mystery present in the ordinary objects and surfaces that make up a lot of our perceived world. Resistance is an important word here too, against both the spectacularization and the uniformization of complexity in the world. It's a word used by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub in this respect. There is also Giorgio Agamben's example: J.S. Bach refusing the separation of the secular and sacred in his music: an example of the paradox that I value in works that interest me.

MJ: Is there a connection to the black paintings of Frank Stella?

DR: When I was at art school I came across a Hollis Frampton photograph of Stella kneeling in front of a painting with a house painters brush, on his way to completing some rectangular concentric lines, and it made a lot of sense to me. I didn’t feel at that moment I could enter into painterly expressionism or conceptual minimalism, there seemed to be too many assumptions that I didn’t connect to, maybe just too many assumptions full stop. But when I looked at the black paintings they have an emotion, and sublimity, but without relying on a contrived invocation of transcendence through gestural painting or ideology. They’re pragmatic in their making, but not without mystery, and they inspired me early on. Later, I found myself in very different terratory to Stella who wanted to move space out of the paintings evenly, I would like space to be in the painting unevenly, and the composition exactly not deriving from the rectangular support.

MJ: How does writing about art affect your practice?

DR: It accesses a different aspect of my relationship to the work that I see. In the craft of writing unexpected thoughts connect, or appear and different associations are made that I couldn't anticipate without doing the actual writing itself. It happens to a degree with conversational thinking, but in the isolated experience of writing it can be how new thoughts arrive unexpectedly. Thinking thoughts by actively producing painting or writing. I agree with the view that Mallarmé’s poems, and Klee’s paintings, can be thought of as machines that generate form and meaning themselves. Produced, that is, in the Greek sense, and not created, in the Thomist theological sense. Benjamin proposes that language is already a translation of the language of things. Paintings are things too, and we attempt to translate them.

Sharon Butler interview for Two Coats of Paint 2016, excerpts:

Sharon Butler: Abstraction seems to be having a moment right now, but you’ve been making abstract paintings for a long time. Why are you drawn to it?

David Rhodes: Abstraction is now one way of making a painting among many others, for various reasons abstraction has been the only way for me to make paintings since my first years as a student, this is despite the fact that abstract painting was often viewed with contempt during these years. I was not interested in either making figurative painting, much as I loved many examples of it, usually historically, or in joining the exodus a la mode from painting to other media. I discovered that there are possibilities for me in painting, for example in using chance, indirection: the throw of a dice in the process of making. Also, I found that correspondences occurred with other interests, for example fugue and canon forms in music find equivalencies: as does timbre, all of which are associated with music or sound, but can be apposite for visual experience too: in painting. I wanted to see what would happen in each painting and by making the same painting in a way, over and over, I was compelled by difference. I think of this now as a form of automatism that releases retrospectively and with fecundity the formal elements that I am unaware of at the time of making each painting. The interstices of line I orient differently, and whilst being relatively small changes they lead to unexpected constellations. I'm not looking to make virtuosity an effect. In my paintings I don't work to show my preexisting thoughts, the paintings are not propositional so much as they have physical characteristics that lead to new thoughts. As I see it, the exilic power of painting is in the endless, discontinuous, fragmented, nomadic, and always interrogative: this forms and unforms painting. What we are calling abstract painting is this for me.

TCOP: But what about the black? Let’s get back to that. Do you see it as the absence of color (like light) or the combination of all colors (like paint)? Also, do you mix your own like we were taught in art school?

DR: I’ve always been interested in black as a colour, it's a different and particular source of light. I’ve always been interested in early Italian painting, Cimabue for example, and in Spanish painting, the melancholy in Zurbarán or Velasquez. Also, Byzantine mosaics, like those at Torcello in the Venetian Lagoon, where the inversion to a black ground with white figures interested me, the wall fresco paintings of Pompeii, Attic red and black figure vases from Greece, Coptic textiles from Egypt. Matisse reintroduced black in a radical way as a colour. I'm using only carbon black on canvas at present, I have also used linen and burlap in the past, and I use Sumi ink on paper. I found Frank Stella's black paintings interesting for other reasons than those used to categorised them, that is ,for me they are an example of new possibilities, not reductive painting that represents an end point at all. The matter of fact way of their facture didn't undermine but actually seemed to enhance their ambiguity. In my paintings any "deductive structure" is not determined by the framing shape, rather, this acts as another cut at the paintings edge. The problem of colour is not optical only, it's libidinal, any sublimation is consequential, but not something typically addressed openly in post-painterly abstraction, colour is intimately entangled in a host of social and subjective determinations, including this libidinal economy, it's unavoidable for the viewer too. The first generation of Ab-Ex painters, Pollock, Newman, Rothko understood all this, there is an admirable impurity in their work: there is more there than formal qualities; the immanent medial restraints of paint and canvas. Optically, I don’t want the black to be assertively cool or warm in itself. Natural light, as it fluctuates changes its appearance. My emphasis on material and process is not what was once regarded as progressive, but which was overly rational, the "sombre order of technical efficiency" as Simon Hantaï put it. One could say about the color black, "The night (black) is the clarity that reveals the longing for colors." I often use paint manufactured in or available in the city or region where I’ve been living and working, so while I’m here in New York for example, I’m using Golden acrylic, in Berlin, Lascaux acrylic.

TCOP: Using local materials is also a nod to tradition. In the old days people used the pigments found in their community.

DR: Yes, you’re right. I am painting on canvas bought in this country from a supplier in Georgia and at 18 to 24 lbs per square inch it has enough surface for me, it provides a clear tactility. This is a found material in one sense, as well as an active element in the paintings, and also a color. The painted areas can appear less tactile than the raw canvas and I like that contradiction. The physicality of the painting comes simply from the material that the paint is applied to. There is a one to one relation with the viewer, two physical entities, one moving in relation to the other. 

TCOP: Which contemporary painters interest you. 

DR: Many, Helmut Federle, David Novas, Martin Barré also I still look at those from recent history: Burri, Fontana, Kounellis, Hartung, Poliakoff, Hantaï, Rothko, Newman, Pollock. Pollock's influence on European painting is extraordinary, and not the same as his extraordinary influence in the U.S. where it was soon directed into post-minimalist sculpture and away from painting, unlike in France. Lee Lozano's angular compositions interest me a lot too. 

TCOP: You are fond of French and German abstract painters.

DR: Yes. When I was at art school and after in London I identified with painters who were renewing and exploring painting not rejecting its visuality and material conditions. A reason for moving to Berlin in the Fall of 2003 was that I had always been interested in post-war European abstract painting, German, Italian, French, Spanish as well as that from U.S. which had dominated the London scene. There is not such a strong tradition of modernism, or modern art in England, it never became as central to the culture as it did in Berlin, Paris, and later New York. Before the WW II there was a tradition of modern art in much of Europe, it becomes complicated after. That war caused a diaspora, and of course some of those fleeing intellectuals and artists came to New York. I find that despite globalization there are continuing and important contrasts between places because of the context derived from distinct histories. In Germany, for example, Palermo and Förg have long been important artists. The critical discourse around painting is different in Europe to that here in the U.S.. French post war painting had a small presence in London at the time I left (2003) or in New York, these days that is changing, slowly.

TCOP: You’re an itinerant painter! I like that. I went from sublet to sublet for years. I like the way moving around throws the work into a semi-permanent transition mode. I didn’t try to maintain consistency. But it looks like you’ve been able to focus on the same images despite your changing surroundings.

DR: I have been an itinerant artist, yes, a voluntary exile but not entirely in control of this. This also changes the perception of where I'm not, the place that I leave. What happens in the paintings is not a reflection of a place in literal terms, it’s rather about being excilic, experiencing otherness as a person. There are great advantages in staying put too, of course. John Ashbery described American painters living in Paris as "apatrides," meaning that they were stateless, he thought the sporadic relocations and geographic switchbacks of a peripatetic life allowed them to come at painting afresh and slightly off balance. It is interesting to consider this aspect of working, and of making a life somewhere else, whether it's Picasso, Joan Mitchell, Hans Hartung, Simon Hantaï or James Bishop. And in a somewhat different way, as it was not their initiative and they moved so young, Gorky or Rothko. The questions are: what is lost, retained, revisited, and eventually, what remains, in moving from place to place.

TCOP: Have your paintings changed since your last show at Hionas three years ago?

DR: The paintings from three years ago all used the same sequence of vertical lines that essentially made two V-shapes. The rhythm involved and the depth of the space had a focused ambiguity that was less all over compared to the current paintings. Now, all the off-vertical lines are multiplied, this drawing in the surface or tableaux produces a fractured discontinuous space. Diagonals make for a dynamic balance destabalising space, undermining the ideal of a grid. The lines are between vertical and horizontal, on the way to balance but not there yet, not fixed if you like. I think of the lines as accumulating gesture, interruption, dissonance. When the paintings capture light falling on them an unevenness of surface is revealed. The lines are incised in the surface. It is for me not to do with flatness, but tactility. Working into the surface of the tableaux. I make the paintings quickly, unseen until the tape is removed. I can look at them as the viewer does later, and they do surprise me: any lengthy reflection comes a posteriori of actual painting.

TCP: What about the Music, film, literature, that is important for you?

Music that I listen to includes, J.S. Bach, Beethoven's late quartets, Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, Sprechstimme (spoken singing), John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Billy Holiday, Son House, Ragas, Flamenco, Neopolitan traditional, all for amongst other reasons the timbre, repetition, structure, rhythm. Film, in particular Antonioni, Godard, Rossellini, Ozu, Straub & Huillet, Chantal Ackerman, all directors who use montage, temporality and stillness. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a 1920 German silent film with painted sets, and slanting camera angles, the German angle as it's called. Photographers I look at, Brassai's photos of graffiti, and Luigi Ghirri's Italian street scenes. Poetry, Tu Fu, Sappho, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Hölderlin, Célan, Reverdy, Appolinaire, Jabés, Lorca, Rosselli, Fontini, Pasolini, Ashbury, Bishop, Schuyler. Speaking of literature, Javier Marias' recent novel I'm reading at the moment.

TCP: You are articulate about your work, is this because you are also writing about art?

DR: Thanks, but I find it difficult to write about my own work, when I do it's usually in the form of notes and citations. 

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.