My paintings explore the layered and disjunctive spaces of urban landscape. They combine this physicality with a spare and decisive approach to abstract painting. They involve hybrid spaces, evoking both the external world of the street and an intimate sense of lived experience within the body.
The paintings are densely layered and decisively edited, resulting in compositions that feel solid and rooted, yet open and breathing. Configurations of light punctuate dark passages, and shapes group together and lock in, setting up a spatial structure which appears to shift as implied connections assert an alternate read. The light is that of late afternoon, dusk or evening, sometimes within the same painting, resulting in a buzz of darkly luminous color.
This is an evocative, impure, and vernacular approach to abstraction. The work reflects a particular attitude about improvisation, in which the focus is not on elaboration, but rather on the elemental way that parts refer back to the underlying statement, allowing resultants to emerge organically. The work is informed by a direct painting process, with a pronounced sense of fluidity and interdependence.
The paintings are rooted in the familiar, but take on challenging and resonant spaces for thought. The potential for painting to touch experiential nerves in this way is not a given, nor any sort of special privilege, but it is possible, and it’s what I’m working for.
-David Rich