NYAB Event - David Rhodes “Schwarzwälde”

David Rhodes “Schwarzwälde”

Hionas Gallery LES

This event has ended.

For Schwarzwälde Rhodes introduces a collection of new, untitled paintings on raw rectangular canvas in which he composes exacting strips, zips, bands, and triangles with the use of tape and carbon black acrylic. These forms, while meticulously placed, perform the fascinating feat of rarely intersecting and simultaneously never truly opposing one another.

Each pictorial space Rhodes creates shows a series of relationships at work. And whether the eye navigates each space with ease or haste, these relationships of line, form, and shade often appear more converse than symbiotic, like two people alone in the same room. “I find that working with such limitations can be productive,” says Rhodes, “…for making a pictorial space wherein the individual components all interact.” Indeed, Rhodes’ abstractions reveal just how lovely austerity can be.

The seeming simplicity of Rhodes’ paintings also lends them an unmistakable architectural quality. His carefully placed lines and chevrons, and the varying degrees of thickness he applies to each, comprise structures of mutually supportive elements that could not stand without one another. Simply examine the column of a Le Corbusier structure or the precision of a late-1950s Frank Stella painting and the genesis of Rhodes’ compositions will become clear. Additionally, the rhythmic spacing of lines and the deliberate changes in direction deftly executed by Rhodes recall the work of Brazilian artists Lygia Pape and Helio Oitichica. Each band and strip, each soft or hard edge, is a
piece of something grander. And yet with little more to work with than the simplest of geometric forms, viewers will take away, according to the artist, “a perceived reality that retains openness rather than communicates a specific meaning.”

[Image: David Rhodes “Untitled” (2013), acrylic on raw canvas, 20x19 in.]