The guiding light: Gary Richman's illuminating 'Remainders'

November 30 - December 7, 2000

[Art Reviews]

The guiding light

Gary Richman's illuminating 'Remainders'

by Johnette Rodriguez

"The ripple of water-skates in mummy cave"

Whenever I've traveled in the Southwest, I've experienced a kind of visual imprint that takes weeks to fade -- the pervasive reds and browns of the buttes and mesas, the glowing pinks and purples in the broad-vista sunsets, the gradations of blue and gray in the shadows cast by mountains and pueblos. Artist Gary Richman, in a statement accompanying his current show, Remainders -- a two-part exhibit of paintings ("Hoodoos") and an artist's book ("Flashflood") at the Main Gallery at the University of Rhode Island through December 10 -- alludes to that phenomenon when he says that his paintings are "about what my mind made of the light I saw in the Four Corners region of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico after the fall of 1999."
In this stimulating and exciting exhibit of 24 large-scale, abstract collage and acrylic pieces that Richman created after that '99 trip, that light is there, sometimes in unusual juxtapositions of color, sometimes in techniques that make the flat surface of the canvas appear three-dimensional, sometimes in a wide-open-spaces feel to the composition. These "paintings," as Richman refers to them, are a heady mix of vibrant energy, musicality, playfulness, meditativeness and dramatic tension.
In a recent conversation at URI's Fine Arts Center, Richman emphasized that "it's hard for people to look at a work abstractly like the artist did -- they need to see subject matter most of the time." Thus, rather than leave the pieces untitled, he composed 24 very Southwestern-sounding titles and handed them to the students who helped him hang the show to assign to the paintings.
"I don't mind whatever content gets read into them, but I don't put it there," he noted. "My shapes are abstract. There are even instances when something looks too much like something else, and then I don't use that shape, because everyone will see that."
Thus, the titles act as a guide in distinguishing them one from the other, but they don't point to any conscious intent by the author. The overall effect of the paintings -- setting aside, for the moment, any specific images they may conjure up -- is one of careful intent: an eye for balancing color and line, a vision that sees movement in the cant of shapes; here a bit of whimsy, there a small surprise.
Richman starts the whole process by making stacks and stacks of paper, all treated in various ways: hand-painted or hand-sprayed; covered with shaving cream, Thompson's wood seal, oil and water, or other liquids to set up a resist technique; layered with paint in ways that make some mottled, others dappled, still others streaked with finger squiggles. Very lightweight paper is loosely balled and then hit with paint spray at various angles and with various colors, creating a remarkable depth when spread flat. Other pieces of paper are accordion-folded and also sprayed, with Richman laying down a base and then contrasts -- "I'm looking for the value of the color" -- until it looks three-dimensional.
Once he has painted a large number of sheets -- many of which could stand on their own -- he cuts them into strips, tearing them into irregular shapes or carefully marking out geometric shapes, such as irregular pentagons or attenuated parallelograms. Then, working within the framework of a 291/4 x 471/4-inch horizontal rectangle, he begins to assemble the collages. Though some kinds of fragments become motifs in the completed works, re-appearing when we least expect them, other "remainders" are found only in a specific work, giving that piece its own visual language.
"Waiting out a storm at point of faith pass" has definite architectural and astronomical suggestions: a small four-sided shape in blue-gray within a larger taupe pentagon is quite pueblo-like, with hemispheres and a crescent above it, like sunrise, sunset and moonrise. "How brother turtle ate green river lizard" has a fragment of prickly desert vegetation in the center, with lots of rain, wind and cloud images around it.
" `This,' said the arrow to the weeping eye" has a very sky-like blue and white spray-painted fragment that catches your attention, and the dark diamond in the middle seems like a kite dancing in the wind. "The chase to reach blue sipapu has begun" has so many shifting angles that your eye must follow in so many directions that it's almost like a dance, turning your focus from right to left and back again. There are many vertical lines in this piece, like the pages of several open books, with geometric shapes flying out of them: triangles, pieces of a circle, trapezoids.
Some paintings have fragments with glittery silver threads or Florentine-style ripples. One has tiny shards of bright pink peeking around the edges of much larger shapes of blue and gray. Others have long strips of the accordion-fanned triple-shaded paper dominating the painting. Richman's skillful conducting of color, line and shape strikes here a ponderous chord, there a lilting high-note, creating in one painting a layered symphony, in another a swirling concerto.
In "The ripple of water-skates in mummy cave," it is that swirling, a flow of motion that sweeps up, over and around that is so captivating. Balanced by black and white wavy patches on either side of the bottom and by red, white and blue splotched pieces on the top, the focus here is a long swooping arc, almost a curl of paper, whose implied movement is reflected in the smaller movements of paint strokes. Richman's colors give this painting an unusual calm, almost a sense of decorum, while his lines enliven it and make it sing.
"A lot of decisions about the placement of these fragments," pondered Richman, "are based on a sensibility that is consistent, intact, functioning, and overriding any emotional content in the painting. When I'm in my studio, it's a non-verbal, non-intellectual, non-emotional process.
"That sensibility includes a certain kind of confluence," he continued, "the axis of motion that shapes seem to have. Every shape has an equal and opposite shape. Every shape is reactive to others; they must be very carefully adjusted. That kind of sensibility has to be respected as an escape from my handiness with words, as an escape from the rational, linear, and everyday."
But Richman is definitely handy with words. He is, in fact, widely known in the art world for his artist's books, of which "Flashflood" is the 18th. In it, he creates two incredible stories, inspired by bits of historical information and by his own collage of photographs, petroglyphs and line drawings that make up the book. Richman collects old tomes of all kinds, in order to garner images from them. In this case many photos (of faces, breasts, and torsos) were taken from a textbook on plastic surgery. Other photos, from a lifesaving manual, have been computer-screened in such a way as to blur their edges and make them surreal, like those sent back from the moon.
Sprinkled among these are line drawings from books on child development and parenting and on acupressure points. There are also children's primitive line drawings and the dark shadows of Southwestern petroglyphs strategically placed among the photos.
After laying out his chosen images on the pages, Richman conjured up his tales, with droll wit and precise descriptions. One tells of a Marrano Jew journeying with Coronado to the New World: "Gedaliah, Father's amulet deep in his underwear, escaped the tribunal at Cordova by taking up the crucifix and rosary . . . What matchless chutzpah Gedaliah must have had!" The other relates the adventures of Dr. Dogwit, Richman's alter ego who appears in many of his previous books. Dogwit wants to compare Cartesian philosophy and Native American "prankster" mythologies and gets caught in the maelstrom of a flashflood. The connections between Richman's words and images require an intellectual exercise by the reader that is quite different from reactions to the paintings.
Once again Richman has sought a balance, this time in the show as a whole. He has used abstract "remainders" for his paintings and very definitive "remainders" for his book, drawing alternately on the instinctive and the analytical sides of our brains. This makes for a fascinating exhibit.