Richard Aldrich
05 May - 18 Jun 2011
RICHARD ALDRICH
Museo
5 May – 18 June, 2011
In the recent past, and in plans for future exhibitions, there has often been some sort of conceit for each show (for instance Narrative With 5 Characters here three years ago). This show is similar to the Bortolami show in 2009 in that it is more just intuitively picking paintings to go together. That said there is an outlying framework within which they all work: the idea of the museum and looking back. I always liked the word retrospective and lament how it has come to mean “a show” and not “a way of looking”. But the show is called Museo–-Italian for museum, skewed slightly in the way that an odd wall is added to the space, but also because I’ve had such good experiences with Italian dealers. Just now I am looking at the works again in the real. A few go back to 2004, and in them are the beginnings of ideas I’m still thinking about and working with. For instance, an early romantic painting done in January 2006, also paintings where an image or object is transferred from one canvas to another and another, simultaneously creating and recording that painting’s history. Also early experiments with the role of time, as seeds planted a few years back begin to sprout here; a painting shown four years ago is exhibited again, but this time with its companion, which explains, in essence, their creation, but at the same time makes them less about process and more about the illumination of process. It is minor, if only to say it is just two of sixteen paintings, but that is the point too, lots of minor things are always happening. There is no grand statement, no singular concept to present, but rather a constellation of subtle gestures that, over time, space, medium and format, are coexisting and effecting one and other. The thesis, as it were, is more global and cannot be seen in a single painting, but rather the paintings become almost a kind of subject or subject matter in an embodiment, as opposed to an illustration, of systems interacting.
Museo
5 May – 18 June, 2011
In the recent past, and in plans for future exhibitions, there has often been some sort of conceit for each show (for instance Narrative With 5 Characters here three years ago). This show is similar to the Bortolami show in 2009 in that it is more just intuitively picking paintings to go together. That said there is an outlying framework within which they all work: the idea of the museum and looking back. I always liked the word retrospective and lament how it has come to mean “a show” and not “a way of looking”. But the show is called Museo–-Italian for museum, skewed slightly in the way that an odd wall is added to the space, but also because I’ve had such good experiences with Italian dealers. Just now I am looking at the works again in the real. A few go back to 2004, and in them are the beginnings of ideas I’m still thinking about and working with. For instance, an early romantic painting done in January 2006, also paintings where an image or object is transferred from one canvas to another and another, simultaneously creating and recording that painting’s history. Also early experiments with the role of time, as seeds planted a few years back begin to sprout here; a painting shown four years ago is exhibited again, but this time with its companion, which explains, in essence, their creation, but at the same time makes them less about process and more about the illumination of process. It is minor, if only to say it is just two of sixteen paintings, but that is the point too, lots of minor things are always happening. There is no grand statement, no singular concept to present, but rather a constellation of subtle gestures that, over time, space, medium and format, are coexisting and effecting one and other. The thesis, as it were, is more global and cannot be seen in a single painting, but rather the paintings become almost a kind of subject or subject matter in an embodiment, as opposed to an illustration, of systems interacting.