“ STEVE RIEDELL:  Paintings  ‘From The Paintings List—There to Here’ “   -   through JANUARY 29, 2022

  BY APPOINTMENT - well in advance: 215 925-5389 / [email protected]   

For this solo exhibition we chose, with the artist, paintings from the period 1986 to the present.
The thought is to try to illuminate the salient, but somewhat hard to describe, qualities of this distinctive work. This period goes back a handful of years prior to meeting Steve Riedell and beginning to represent his work in the early 1990s. This was not long after he came to Philadelphia by way of New York City and Cincinnati.

He was born in California in 1954 and studied at the respected Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in the early 1980s.
We chose to make somewhat of a “core sample” from this period, as some of the first works we saw in the studio preceded our actual meeting. All the works held a sense of “ongoingness” which continues to the present, even through clear, very intentional changes in form and format.

The works have a certain roughness, which turns out to be a very eloquent elegance.
Though not representational, and very focused on paint properties and the action of painting, the work (whether quite small and boxy or expansive and made from delicately complex components) conveys a sense of gravity, both in physical reality as well as in the “presence” that it carries. 

These paintings are usually not on traditional flat, rectangular stretchers, but are built out, almost like architectural elements that can’t have any practical use. They are then married with canvas, linen, or other cloth material that has been primed and prepared in advance with innumerable layers of very thinly applied paint—Riedell’s favored medium of oil paint and beeswax thinned way down to a translucency with turpentine. These prepared skin-like canvases are attached so as to cover the support, trimmed to fit, and then painted upon again. Then, quite often, the whole thing (support structure and all) is taken apart or even cut, and is then restructured. The canvas comes back, but is sometimes folded over, around, and just lightly attached. 

More painting happens, while the pigments shine through the translucent layers. 

The process seems illogical, and results are unpredictable, especially to us, but these paintings are mysteriously powerful and evocative—something toward which the artist moves, guided by experience, skill, and intuition until he recognizes the thing, when it comes into being. 

The pages-long “Paintings List”, which forever lives and expands like an ancient scroll on his studio wall, holds the titles of the paintings finished over many years. It’s both a record and a source, and it’s maybe a verbal analogy to the layers and layers of light-capturing pigments that carry these paintings in an ongoing procession toward a destination that can be sensed but not named.    

(VISITS WELCOME BY APPOINTMENT well in advance: Phone: 215 925-5389  -  E-mail: [email protected])