Brent Richardson "Its Been A While"

Brent Richardson
Its Been A While
April 6, 2024 - May 24, 2024
17 Pike Street

I grew up in Southern California and finished school in the Bay Area before moving to New York. Coming of age where I did in the ’60s, my initial influences included custom car culture, especially the curvilinear abstractions inspired by pinstriping. I’ve always been fascinated by the movement implied by curved lines next to each other. This is probably also the byproduct of the blurred images produced in photography which show speed, movement and time passing. Also, there’s a big influence from cinema: light, movement and composition. And since I have a realistic background in my training, I like to incorporate illusionistic elements into the abstractions, to add another element of ambiguity.

— Brent Richardson

IT’S BEEN A WHILE since his last show, but to those who know him and have followed his work, Brent Richardson has always been an artist’s artist, continually conversing with his peers and predecessors even as he has produced his own highly individual body of work. Beginning with his first New York solo outing at the Castelli Gallery in 1987, he has continued to explore the blurry borders between abstraction and representation, form and chaos, the ideal and the real.

Swirling across the paper or canvas with a wild and playful energy, shapes throw off body-snatcher tendrils, vestigial limbs and disembodied eyes that seem to point in all different directions—to art of the past (Matta, early Mondrian), psychedelic comics and posters, the duck-rabbit optical illusions of Jasper Johns, B Movies, hot rods, Loony Tunes and Popeye, all dancing around to a dissonant, surf-guitar soundtrack.

A large drawing, “Passage” (2023) features what looks like a shiny pupil, a flying saucer key lime pie, a fox’s tail, a hairy armpit, floating globules of mercury making love, a painter’s palette, a cell with mitochondria, mouse ears, an upside-down parakeet and who knows what else the viewer might dredge up from their subconscious and/or pop culture memory, the whole thing sort of held together in a shape that suggests one of those monumental Calder or di Suvero sculptures in Storm King (if Storm King contained a vibrant but seriously sketchy neighborhood tucked away in its rolling hills).

In another work, the painting “Winter” (2024), suspended over a gray, almost-seascape, there’s a sort of angry vortex which looks as if a cluster of big-nosed comic-book deadbeats (think Wimpy and his cheeseburgers), along with maybe a fish or two, were engaged in a knock-down drag-out fight—the old-fashioned cartoon kind, where fists and faces and flying hats pop out of a swirling mass of dust and typographical curses.

Or not.

The shapes in Brent Richardson’s work are tantalizingly suggestive of everything and nothing; given volume and life by the artist’s skillful pencil and brushwork, casting shadows in an ambiguous space, they have a striking there-ness which yet stubbornly (or coyly) refuses to resolve into anything “real.” If the shackled residents of Plato’s famous cave—we mortals—could see the ideal Forms only indirectly, projected as flickering torchlight shadows against the rough, uneven stone, Richardson’s paintings and drawings represent another degree of distance, reality’s blurry re-run on a staticky, rabbit-eared, c.1968 Sony Trinitron TV with its back turned to us.

As the artist has pointed out, there is often an implied horizon in his work, a pictorial space that grounds the play of forms and forces, adding an illusionistic depth that invites the viewer in—the non-figurative Surrealists, the mysterious landscapes of Yves Tanguy in particular, come to mind here. But then, in a few paintings, the horizon is actual: the suggestive, shifting shapes of the artist’s imagination competing with the rosy, late afternoon clouds and the restless chop and swell of the sea.

For viewers who’ve been to Montauk, Long Island, where Richardson and his family live, these works might evoke the view from the Shadmoor cliffs over Ditch Plains beach, near the area known as the Poles. Away from the overcrowded main break, this is where the artist—an avid surfer—his wife, son and friends have been catching waves for the past few decades. Even as Montauk and the world keep changing, Richardson can be found most mornings with his dog Ella, standing at the edge of the crumbling clay cliffs overlooking the crescent of sand—or whatever has remained after the winter weather has swept its share away. He looks out over the horizon, both real and implied, checking out the surf and also, maybe, finding inspiration for his next work in the oceanic, yin-yang flux of the eternal and the ephemeral.

It’s been a while, but the artist abides.

— Jean-Christophe Castelli

Installation