The Brooklyn Rail

Though at first David Rhodes’s paintings appear to be reductive, repetitive and formulaic, with time one may come to the conclusion that his works are refreshingly deceptive in that he makes paintings that inform thought rather than ones that illustrate soundbites, or are displays of subjectivity, and taste. For two decades, Rhodes’s paintings have consisted mainly of ever-so slightly inflected black grounds articulated by raw canvas bands of varying widths and lengths. This exhibition of recent works, titled ALETHEIA, follows suit.

Relative to the paintings presented here, we can only imagine that the title is meant to signal that these fields of matte black and their compositions of parallel lines that terminate in such a way as to indicate a vertical band running down the center of the canvas, are meant to be truthful and revelatory. (Aletheia is the Greek goddess of truth.) From this, one may generate numerous analogous musings concerning the existential and phenomenological speculations embedded in Rhodes’s works.

Let’s suppose that Rhodes does put his philosophical reflections to use so as to manifest a “truth”—perhaps it is what Jacques Derrida identifies as the truth in painting—what he meant by this is: art with differing degrees of accuracy calls into question the varied ways that we understand the world—it can challenge our presumptions/assumptions. For Rhodes this translates into various vertical rectangles of differing dimensions, each covered in a substratum of raw canvas upon which he has applied a mottled black ground inscribed with patterns of raw canvas stripes of differing widths and lengths. Each painting is a variation of this format, what differs is the arrangement of the stripes—in the case of these, they abruptly terminate to indicate a vertical stripe. Optically, the patterns of stripes appear to shift as if they are at one moment both on the same plane and then on different ones. Occasionally, Rhodes’s lines give the illusion of cutting into this central boundary to form a silhouetted shape where previously there was only a pattern of stripes. As a result of the stark contrast, another effect is a secondary black retinal after-image of the stripes floating before one’s eyes. As such we encounter his paintings as temporal events. What comes to mind is Bridget Riley’s early works in which she rendered horizontally oriented black lines so that they appear to oscillate or pulsate, fooling viewers into seeing movement and change within what is a static painting. In doing so she demonstrates that vision is not neutral.

The black areas of Rhodes’s canvases are determined by the asymmetrical patterns of the stripes that cut into them from the stretcher’s edge and abruptly terminate at an undemarcated vertical, which most often runs down the center of the canvas. The varied widths of the stripes are determined by the widths of the tape Rhodes uses to mask-off these unpainted areas of raw canvas. The pattern of these bands varying thicknesses appear to be intuitively determined. The introduction of such an element is where Rhodes retains aspects of his pre-Minimalist roots, in that while his work is pared down to a limited number of elements, it does not partake of Minimalism’s essentialist logic and industrial (machine) aesthetic.

Rhodes permits himself to introduce into his reductive, rule oriented vocabulary, non-systemic variables as a repressed trace of his presence. He makes it apparent that he is attempting to aesthetically balance the technological (the systemic) and the humanistic. From this, it might be safe to conclude that Rhodes’s paintings are not only optical, or compositionally systemic, but also indexical—as a painter he is concerned with materiality, process, and the effects of shifts in scale. Therefore, countering what is taking place pictorially, his images stop at the edge of the stretcher bar—there are no drips, splatters, or bleeds. To emphasize his paintings’ frontality, the sides of the stretcher have been apparently masked-off. The white creates another optical illusion, given the color of the raw canvas, the stripes appear to be yellowish and given their varied width seem to fluctuate. Another condition Rhodes acknowledges is that the thick weave of the canvas produces a slight bleeding along the stripes’ edges. Meanwhile, the matte black paint, which at first appears to be a continuous uninflected surface, reveals itself to be in actuality irregularly applied, and has a low-gloss reflective coating applied over it, which becomes apparent as one moves about. Both of these chance elements—the bleed and the paint application—disrupt what might otherwise give Rhodes’s paintings an industrial look. In this manner, though accepting the notion of repetition and variation as unavoidable, he resists the draw of standardization, and the readymade.

Rhodes deploys sources that can’t be found by scrolling through Instagram, and since many of the art magazines from the 1960–1970s cannot be found online it is important here to note that there are alternatives to the heritage of US modernist art history and reductivist formalism, which made abstract art in the main formulaic and dead-ended pursuit. It includes the discourses concerning abstract painting that are part of post-1940s European modernism as well as such US exhibitions as Four Abstract Classicists(1959) curated by Californian art critic Jules Langsner, Second-Generation Abstraction at the Jewish Museum (1963), William C. Seitz’s The Responsive Eye (1963) at the MoMA, Lawrence Alloway’s Systemic Painting (1966) at the Guggenheim, and E.G Goosen’s Art of the Real (1968) at MoMA. The developments in France, Italy, and Germany, along with these now near forgotten curators, critics, and historians and their exhibitions in the States were central to determining the course of abstract art in the 1960s, before Minimalism came to critical and art historical dominance, thus creating the illusion that there were no other alternative approaches to be taken. Rhodes’s work brings a welcome air of recognition to these alternate sources.