The Brooklyn Rail

I circled around Let’s Dance (2025) several times. The centerpiece of Rick Briggs’s exhibition I love Painting + Painting Loves Me, Let’s Dance is a five-foot-tall rectangular tower of color: a sheet of canvas, mostly red, is elaborated with stains, puddles and rivulets of dark greens and browns and black, and heightened with spatters of thick gold enamel. The sheet of color is unashamedly stapled to a lumber structure, whose grain is highlighted by being stained a piercing yellow, almost as if to say, in cartoon symbolism “this is wood.” In terms of the arcane minutiae of modern art history/theory, the question in my mind was, is this a three dimensional painting, á la seventies s experiments of such trailblazers as Ellen Phelan or Anne Truitt, or was it a flat painting wrapped, or bent, around Briggs’s reinterpretation of a stretcher? It matters a lot to me, and it clearly matters a lot to Briggs, because the rest of the exhibition offers a window into the overwhelming irreverent context of the artist’s work.

A constellation of small paintings act as a glossary of the artist’s arguments with the institution of painting. It’s not that Briggs doesn’t like painting—as the show’s title indicates, he loves painting, but there is painting that just happens as a by-product of human beings thinking and working with color; and then there is painting that has become detached from our instinctive love of color, mess making, mythology, and spontaneity; the latter appears to be on his shit-list. These little paintings offer brief and pithy lessons, and not just metaphysical, they are juicy little statements in the art of complementary colors and the coordination of contradictory textures. In Paradise (2020), trails of cerulean blue and a lime green spray emanate from the lower left of the canvas, while black oil streaks amplify the sense of upward motion. Shamelessly laminated to the surface are the seductive semigloss color samples from the paint department of the hardware store, the kind you really want to collect and hoard because of their pureness and smoothness. The message is succinct: these colors are just as lovely as those you squeeze from a tube of Sennelier or Old Holland. Ritual Object (2020) is a tangle of black worm trails eliding amongst yellow dots over a mucky background, brought into an almost biblical sense of order by the applique, at center, of an oppressive wooden paint stirrer colored red. The clash of practical painting versus art becomes a confrontation of titanic proportions in these little canvases through Briggs’s sparse and considered use of singular marks. I say marks, because he expressly avoids brushstrokes: the paint in all of these images is sprayed, rolled, poured, or drawn with what appears to be an oil stick. The simple direct use of the medium is calibrated to prevent the illusory use of paint.

Satchel Projects is a small cube; curator Andrea Champlin has opted to present Briggs’s work in a ritualistic symmetrical layout, with Let’s Dance centered in front of the longest wall, with two smaller pieces, Bouquet for Mom (2017) and In the Dark Wood (2022) on either side of that wall, and the two largest works, Life Saver (2023) and the eponymous I Love Painting + Painting Loves Me (2020) facing each other on the front and back walls. The arrangement lends credence to Briggs’s Jungian use of gesture and form—there is the implication that aspects of the painter’s art (not necessarily the artist’s art) like paint stirrers, color swatches, and the circlets of dried paint that adhere to the underside of the top of a paint can, hold a place in the collective unconscious. In Bouquet for Mom, a decorative Matisse-ian composition with a frond and stars is intruded upon by the thick, crusty, and inevitable paint top circlets. In Life Saver, five broad stripes make both a painting and a candy wrapper that is arresting and beautiful. I Love Painting + Painting Loves Me takes the biggest risk by placing the name of the whole project in the right hand corner: does text help or hinder Briggs’s argument? I don’t think writing enters into the debate between painting and Painting, nor, as an aside, does Briggs’s title reference Joseph Beuys’ project I like America and America Likes Me (1974). On the left side of I Love Painting… three paint rollers have been inserted into the canvas, mimicking a pair of eyes and then below, a vagina/penis (a paint roller can be both!). As much as he wants the paint in the can to be the same paint on the canvas, Briggs is cognizant with his visual sexual pun that a transformation has taken place, and he really loves that.