The Brooklyn Rail

Beyond the Frame: Abstraction Reconstructed, CANADA’s two-man show uniting Denzil Hurley and Reginald Sylvester II, seeks to delineate points of confluence between the two artists. Indeed, both artists purpose the quadrilateral form. This is most markedly evinced in Sylvester’s Offering (Deep Blue) (2022), a large strip of stretched ultramarine rubber on exposed substrate, and Hurley’s adjacent Portal and the Deep Blue #1 (2012), which depicts a plumb azure aperture scrawled in crayon and marker. Admittedly, the two artists’ approach to the form is significantly disparate. Eschewing purely geometric forms, Sylvester hews towards splatter-flecked and creased rubber, canvas, and protective shells. On the other hand, Hurley’s rectangles, slats, and hollowed square canvases are even, minimal, and exacting.

Throughout his “Semi” series, Sylvester charts skeins across crimson, azure, and rusted-ore painted heavy duty “pup” tent military shells. Each square pictorial field reveals a caustic texture, painted-over metal snaps and belted zip ropes fettering rectangular folds and securing triangular envelopes into the corroded canvas. The cerulean Semi 007 (2022), patched with iron fillets and cobalt ribbons, and the snow-bitten vermillion Semi 010 (2024) are, in terms of palette, the most optically sensuous. Sylvester’s use of red draws from the seven Mark Rothko “Seagram Murals (1958–59) at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art. Relatedly, in a 2022 interview with Franklin Sirmans, Sylvester remarks that, having moved to New York in mid-2014, he began visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was most affected by “the Abstract Expressionist wing in the back” and, specifically, the scale of the huge Clyfford Stills, Cy Twomblys, Willem de Koonings, and Sam Gilliams. The strongest works on view—and those most resonant with Hurley’s—are, thus, those that make critical contact with this antecedent tradition. But while de Kooning and Rothko explain the warren splatter skeins and rectangular ingots, they do not account for the use of protective material; the latter draws from Sylvester’s father, who was a marine and a military recruiter. In purposing the Vietnam-era military tents and craft gear sourced from the 1960s and ’ 70s, Sylvester is, as he tells Sirmans, is memorializing his father.

Formally speaking, the “Semi” series’ grid-like structure is also inspired by the eponymous semi trucks’ cargo beds, which the artist would, as a young man, spend long hours driving behind. The metal clasps, buttons, creased shelter halves, and studio detritus (receipts, posters, etc.) are pasted into a canvas lined with sgraffito-like vertical and horizontal incisions. All of this suggests an industrial design matrix and Sylvester’s work is resolutely diaristic in its referential arsenal, with the artist collating his biography through tethered, zipped, and clamped manufacturing materials. Eggshell impasto crests and corrugated ochre cleaves are, at times, broken up with undulating fingerprints, stamped and palmed down the length of the canvas. This further underscores the diaristic nature of Sylvester’s work and is in keeping with the Abstract Expressionists’ penchant for self-mythologizing. In both the aforementioned Sirmans interview and in a 2022 interview with Marshall N. Price, Sylvester also frequently mentions that another important leitmotif is his journey of “seeking God [which] is … tied to my art practice.” With the exception of the threshold-like Semi 004 (2024), which floats like an ethereal vertical entryway, and Semi 010 (2024), whose blood-red palette can be interpreted vis-à-vis Christ’s bodily sacrifice, this leitmotif is less identifiable in the works on view.

Hurley’s work—especially his “Glyph” series—also makes contact with boyhood remembrance and war, but dons a more critical stance towards modernism. At first gloss, Hurley’s carved canvases lend themselves to high modernism-inflected analysis the likes of Frank Stella or Ron Gorchov. Yet the post-painterly abstractionists treated the picture support as a literal structure representing only the intrinsic conditions and inherent essence of painting, qua painting. While the high modernist-shaped canvas is a reflexive indexical, enjoying inwards-pointing self-reference, Hurley’s former student, Wallace Whitney, warns us against interpreting Hurley’s works as correspondent “to any minimalist strategy or self-reflexive exercise of ‘what you see is what you get.’” Hurley’s shaped canvases, which in each instance signify and represent, indicate the impossibility of abrogating worldly reference.

Specifically, Hurley’s canvases represent entrances, poster signs, and paragraph blocks. From afar, Hurley’s “Glyph” canvases appear to be painted in strictly monochromatic washes of lemon yellow, pumpkin orange. Strip Glyph #1 (2019) is constituted by five vertical slats, each board laminated with a Stygian surface finish. As one approaches the boards, they notice that each strip slightly varies in width. The rightmost edge of the rightmost slat reveals daffodil-saffron base strokes that peak through the multiple black coats, amber dabs edging from the corner. In Form Glyph #2 (2018), four clouded black rectangles, each of variable length, are posited into a block-shaped whirligig. In both, Hurley espouses modularity but abjures uniformity. He also grounds the mounted canvases by way of a vertical stick. This gives the impression that the abutment balances the canvas. According to Whitney, these sticks recall the “Madam brooms with palm fronts for bristles,” which Hurley, throughout his youth in Barbados, “would have seen his mother and grandmother use daily.” Whitney warns us against reading the works as “an expression of race, black paintings made by a Black man whose materials had originated in the Caribbean,” averring that “Denzil would have rejected them” as he “saw himself as a painter … who worked with form in a ‘reductive’ manner.” Thematizing the canvas as a placard throughout the “Glyph” series, Hurley renders each work pictographic—sign-like, to be exact—such that they espouse “object matter,” or outwards-pointing reference.

In his graphite and ink on paper, Redact #2 (2014), Hurley scrawls two obsidian blocks, one larger and the other a thin band. The work is part of the “Redact” series, which, according to Whitney, were inspired by the anti-Iraq War protests and the black marker blocks that riddled the period’s declassified records. This also illuminates Hurley’s process of painting a base layer that is overtaken by subsequent monochromatic washes. Hurley dissolves the particular signified reference into a mere form/frame. In Redact #2 and Equal Areas, Glyph Within, Without and About (2016–18), two charcoal slabs indicate paragraph-blocked sections—quivering, scratched, and erased in the former, neatly segmented in the latter. In Glyph in 5 parts #3 (2017–18), a rectangular parcel is sundered from the canvas’ center, the flat pictorial surface distilled into sheer negative space; the banana-yellow border becomes a frame for the wall. Here, the canvas-cum-border is distilled into an aperture—a literal sign that frames the artworld institutional setting in which it is placed. Hurley’s semantic stance recalls Jean-Baptiste Du Bos's argument in Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting that fine artworks are natural signs that represent their objects through a resemblance-relation. For Hurley, this resembling is of a piece with the canvas’ rectangular structure. Hurley simplifies its form, reducing and redacting to reveal worldly isomorphisms, while Sylvester, anchoring it with memorabilia, renders the rectangle diaristic.