NYAB Event - Richard Roth "No Hazmats"

Richard Roth "No Hazmats"

Tomlinson Kong Contemporary

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Tomlinson Kong Contemporary presents "No Hazmats", an exhibition of new paintings by the Richmond, Virginia-based artist Richard Roth.

Roth’s paintings are reductive objects and talismans of contemporary culture. Though geometric in appearance, the paintings reference such diverse sources as product and package design, masks, nature, architecture or contours of the body. The saturated color palette is painted in either Flashe or acrylic. Simple suggestions of curve and an exacting articulation of the surface facets endow these paintings with a narrative life that celebrates the magic of the mundane and elevates the ordinary.

Roth returned to painting in 2006 after an almost ten-year hiatus during which his practice consisted of collecting and archiving cultural artifacts such as commercial paint color charts, blank legal forms, targets and women’s compact mirrors. His current paintings are diminutive at approximately 11 3/8” x 8” x 4”, and though there is a human scale to them, especially as they’re installed at the line of sight, these paintings constitute a new, self-fabricated collection. The paintings’ unusual depth elevates them to the realm of intimate, tangible object, enabling the artist to explore the formal concerns of abstract painting in three dimensions, riffing on real and illusionistic space. Most paintings in the exhibition employ two or three colors interacting visually on five sides to produce a single image that unfolds as the viewer shifts position.