Poissant Gallery

by Sarah Gajkowski-Hill

Below is a review that appears in this months ArtsHouston of our current exhibition by Randall Reid, De La Tierra.

Through June 24th, 5102 Center Street
713.868.9337
www.poissantgallery.com

Randall Reid is both an accomplished and productive working artist. With his first accolades won in 1978, he has since swept prizes and cash awards as well as given many solo and group shows each year. Across the country and internationally, this artist is heralded as both seasoned and contemporary. He earned his Master’s degree in painting, but his interesting choice of media is what sets his work apart: most of his pieces are comprised using paint on wood and steel. The construction of the paintings lends itself more to the strength and endurance of a sculpture, but thickness and resonance is what this artist’s subject is all aboutÑa connection with the elements and symptoms of the Earth. This depth and the muted color palette is all about the regeneration, renewal, and timelessness of the Earth’s features.

With an eye for antiquity in a world of industrial materials, Reid makes the steel of his palette warm as he layers paint and wood, leaving a small cut-out window, usually layered transparent papers or inlaid copper, brass, or steel, as the only portal into the meaning of his ambiguous titles.

While most of his subject matter is obscure and intangible in title, with neatly shaped cut-outs and constructionist canvases called things like, Subdivisons, and Past Time, other works are mainly concrete. For instance, in Red Sea, the image of the Red Sea parting is represented as a tiny square within which stands a white steel bar separated by two red rectangles on either side. The steel is built up with planks of wood painted a dark desert brown. This same nearly literal sentiment is taken away from Shifted Sands, in which an off-center window reveals steel bars of yellow in a sea of olive-yellow paint. And what would a show entitled Of the Earth be without the sentiment of seasonality? Works like Thru Winter’s Snow relate the purest form of weather on the cold of a metallic background, reflective of water, snow, crystal and other earthly geographic concoctions. Think Cy Twombley without the canvasÑthe trees, the bark, all brought to shimmering life on the background of neatly hand-cut steel.

As a painting instructor, Reid equips a new generation of artists with the tools and the permission to seek out new ways of using some of the oldest materials known to mankind. Living in Austin, his work tends to take on a Southwestern feel, especially with the Spanish titles he chooses for many beautiful interpretations, such as La Luz de la Vida and La Luz Del Dia.

Reid describes his own vision as an attempt to “establish windows or portholes of time.” Indeed, each painting within a painting makes itself a tiny peep-hole into the subject matter of his carefully chosen title, that of the decay and the strength of the features of la tierra.

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Beyond Surface: Randall Reid

by Suzanne Deats
William Campbell Contemporary Art,
December 2, 2005—January 7, 2006

In art as in life, there is a certain sweep and texture to every experience. Yet, an occasional flash of detail will often serve to illuminate the larger picture, rather than to interrupt its scope. It does so by distilling the overall impression into a sharper focus, much as a solo passage catalyzes a symphony.

Randall Reid works with this idea in his minimal constructions in metal, wood, encaustic, and other materials. At first glance, one sees a subtly worked facade, and then is immediately drawn to a tiny but significant feature within the frame. Reid creates a pristine but subtly rich image and embeds within it a vignette that takes the viewer beyond the first impression in several respects. First, it breaks the surface like a pebble on water, setting up ripples and inferences and associations. Second, it balances the composition like a plumb bob within a building framework, providing the eye with a reference point. Lastly, it functions as a window onto the hidden life of the image. One cannot walk by without noticing the detail and wondering what is going on in there, and soon one is taken into the piece and absorbed by it. Over the past few years, many people who have seen Reid’s work have lingered with it, spending time in quiet contemplation as if it were a celestial mirror or a moment of dreamlike clarity within their waking comprehension.

Under Reid’s hands, steel sometimes looks like wood, which in turn sometimes looks like steel. The ambiguity goes back and forth as the viewer tries to discern what lies beneath the surface. This relationship between natural materials is an important part of Reid’s work. It is, in a sense, a collaboration with nature. The artist constantly watches for interesting bits of material in his everyday surrounds, and also goes to scrap yards and antique stores in search of pieces from which he can extract elements or shapes to put into a new environment of his own making. This juxtaposition results in an alchemy that produces a work of art.

He is particularly delighted when he finds, for instance, a burned and rusted metal fragment unearthed by a tractor, and is able to divide it along internal fault lines so that the mineral spirit shines through. “When I’m creating these pieces,” says Reid, “I feel like I’m in touch with a universal consciousness out there. I’m putting certain factors together in a new form. Some elements have been discarded along a path unknown to me. I’m by chance finding them, and they’re coming back to life.”

Reid’s surfaces can evoke the ancient world, looking by turns Spanish, Italian, or even Egyptian in the case of several pieces with golden areas. Occasionally an almost fossilized image appears as the surface is rubbed away. Although he deliberately works the pieces so that they appear very old, they have a modern, vital feel, as though they had aged like fine wine. “I think about the idea of preservation,” says Reid, “and about wanting or not wanting to age. After all, nothing ever stays the same.”

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Randall Reid: Layers of Perception

by Noted Arts Writer, Suzanne Deats

The first impression of a work of art registers indelibly upon the mind, but this does not necessarily indicate that the deeper meaning is concealed from view, to be discovered through additional investigation. On the contrary, the heart of the matter is almost always hidden in plain sight. Understanding it is another matter. The artist must furnish visual clues, however oblique, that tap into the universal consciousness. Randall Reid’s work directs the eye into depths behind depths, inviting the viewer’s spirit to step into the piece, to explore, to discover the intuitive perfection that is embedded in even the most opaque aspects of the world.

Reid creates compellingly tactile surfaces that stir long-forgotten memories of walls that had become so familiar to us that they ceased to be noticed. Suddenly, their essence becomes visible again, paraphrased by these enigmatic works of art. Weathered and scarred, they conceal other dimensions; pierced by complex glimpses into the beyond, they hint at other lives and other times.

Working with steel, brass, and wood, Reid blurs the line between materials so that metal sometimes looks like wood, while wood takes on different characteristics altogether. His superb technique enables him to transform these ambiguities into evanescent fa�ades that veil their content in the same way that a human face keeps its secrets. Having crafted these rich planes, Reid then presses through them to reveal windows within windows that promise refuge, solitude, and enlightenment. Each person experiences these apertures differently. Expectations are raised but not easily fulfilled, and therein lies the real message: it is the process and not the destination that is interesting; it is the desire to know that gives life to life.

This lively interaction with what is yet to be realized, coupled with a deep affinity for the past, is a hallmark of the American character. Reid is the product of a classically American background that grounded him in history even as it instilled cutting-edge independence of thought. He was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and was brought up in various towns in Texas and Louisiana where his father worked as an engineer in the oil fields. His mother was an artist who, from the time her sons were very young, impressed upon them the importance of reflective time and creative play. This subtle nurturing and guidance laid the groundwork for Reid’s development as an artist.

Reid was interested in everything there was to learn in school. Geometry was a favorite subject because it dealt in spatial relationships; other courses appealed to him because they dealt with form and function. Art was a joy, but it was not the only subject that he considered as a vocation. Only in college did he gravitate in that direction, earning a BFA from Louisiana Tech and an MFA from Texas Tech. Even after that, he maintained an interest in a wide variety of disciplines, yet he kept his primary focus on his path as an artist and a teacher. He started out after graduate school as an Artist In Residence for six years in elementary schools in Louisiana and Alabama. He instilled in the children the idea that throughout their lives, their reality would be a direct product of their own imaginations. In 1988, he moved into higher education, joining the faculty at Texas State University San Marcos and eventually becoming a full professor.

Through his adult life, Reid has remained an artist’s artist. He has devoted a great deal of attention to his students, but at the same time he has maintained a vigorous exhibition schedule, logging in a remarkable 250 solo and group shows. He has won numerous awards, and his work has found its way into countless public and private collections.

Reid’s experiences, from the earliest to the most recent, are integrated into every work of art. He has been searching out and gathering bits and pieces of the natural and manmade environment for forty years, waiting for the exact composition that a particular object will bring to fruition. He refers to all his finished pieces as “earth symptoms” because he either incorporates natural weathering or distresses each fragment by hand, setting up a process by which wood or steel begins its journey back to nature. He refers to this process as “redirecting,” a deceptively simple term that belies the painstaking craftsmanship that goes into it. He casts his materials into different forms by rearranging their elements and shifting their parts. Because each thing already has its own history, the juxtaposition creates a new entity altogether.

By collaborating with nature rather than imposing an artificial structure on it, Reid creates an abstract meditation on the way objects fit into the world, and the way certain thoughts fit into the overall picture. The experience of viewing one of these works of art is closely akin to the observation of patterns in the larger environment or to a discussion of music or philosophy. Dreamlike and contemplative, the images pile up layer upon layer of meaning to create portals into other dimensions.

To travel into one of these works of art is to enter a world of chance encounter and serendipitous discovery. Scraps of discarded material that might have seemed insignificant in other settings assume weight and gravity. The mystery deepens, yet within it is the possibility of illumination that is unlocked by an evolving maturity of vision. Pieces of dreams fall together like parts of a puzzle, becoming the keys that open up perception to deeper meaning.

Suzanne Deats is an arts writer whose work has been published for many years in Santa Fe. She resides in Fort Worth.

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Randall Reid: The Artist as Worker

by Erina Duganne
Assistant Professor of Art History, Texas State University — San Marcos

Upon first glance, Randall Reid’s box-like constructions seems to share certain morphological likenesses and formal affinities with art works often associated with the term Minimalism. Both sets of artists use their works to draw attention to the relationship between the object, the viewer, and its environment. They also share an abstract formal language that consists primarily of precisely measured and repeated geometric shapes as well as such raw material as wood and steel. But in spite of these commonalities, their approaches could not be more disparate. This is because, whereas a Minimalist artist like Donald Judd sought to remove the hand from his objects by having their parts fabricated by external manufacturers and specialists, for Reid, craftsmanship as well as the associative potential of his objects and materialsÑoften found quite accidentally in Central Texas antique stores, flea markets, and salvage yards-are central.

Unlike Judd who sought his works to be seen as a whole, Reid’s works are composed of, and more importantly, depend on the relationships of their parts. The precise nature of these associations, however, is not known to Reid until he is in the process of constructing, or one might even say fitting the pieces of his compositions together. This is because, while Reid may be drawn to certain formal, personal, historical, and even spiritual qualities in the objects and materials that he finds, or that in many instances find him, it is the making, and, more specifically the deconstruction and reconstruction of these items, which determines their artistic use-value.

Reid is particularly drawn to the chance and random encounters that bring him and the objects and materials that form the basis of his works together. He prefers items that have been discarded and even forgotten, especially those whose patina and surfaces suggest the passage of time and so hold within them a richly layered history and spirituality. At the same time, Reid does not let the original use-value of these items dictate their function within his works. This is most evident in his use of text, numbers, and lines, whose formal arrangement, often dissected and reassembled from old signage and measuring devices, some even dating to the 1890s, takes on an abstract rather than symbolic significance.

For Reid, his purpose is not to preserve these items, which he often juxtaposes with newer materials, but rather to reactivate and reinvigorate their artistic potential. In so doing, Reid approaches these items as well as his transformation of them with a kind of formal reverence and preciousness. In this sense one might say that he treats them as a worker, not in a socio-economic sense, but as the product of an imaginative and contemplative workmanship. In incorporating objects and materials, both found and constructed, Reid imbues them with a new artistic use-value. This idea may seem out of place in today’s art world where so many works are regarded in terms of their social and political use-value. Yet, while Reid may embrace traditional ideas about art and art making, it is precisely his artistic re-use and alteration of these items which reminds us, as the German artist Kurt Schwitters remarked in relation to his 1919 Das Arbeiterbild, or The Worker Picture, “Art is a spiritual function of man, the purpose of which is to redeem him from the chaos of life and tragedy.”

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Thinking Inside the Box

Clint Willour
Curator, Galveston Arts Center

I find myself attracted to artists who are intensely concentrated —and Randall Reid certainly fits the bill. He has found a structure that fits his needs —the modestly sized, nearly square rectangle. He continues to mine it for all the content it can yield to the inquiring mind.

In the modern era we have been constantly challenged to think outside the box. Randall’s self-imposed challenge is to think and work inside that box. The result is a constant re-thinking and re-working of the various possibilities and permutations that challenge creates —and re-thinking and re-working is what Reid does best.

From the found materials he has scrounged, scavenged, salvaged, and spirited away for four decades, he succeeds in making magical intimate worlds in a box. Reid’s worlds are alchemical wonders —small cabinets of curiosities, beautifully crafted and thoughtfully (and caringly) constructed. Each implies a narrative, begs for an accompanying story. His is an architecture of dreams and visions —little glimpses into the imagination —little forays into the psyche. He allows us, the viewers, to complete the sentence, to provide the denouement, to finish the dream.

Reid is a subtle colorist who manages to be bold. He is a formalist who avoids the formulaic. His strength is in his ability to wring every possibility out of the parameters of size and materials that he has placed on himself. Lately he has gone more deeply still, using materials that actually include text and thus pushing the narrative even further, but continually giving us only part of the picture —teasing and taunting us to fill in the blanks, to join the dots, to write the last chapter.

Recurring encounters with Reid’s work embolden me to imagine that I am an archaeologist uncovering fragments of some not-so-long-lost civilization —forcing me to envision who the inhabitants of this place and time were, conjuring up visions of villages, towns and cities filled with craftspeople who lovingly built for permanence and stability.

Randall Reid is ever the artisan, crafting whole concepts within a measured rectangle, but he ultimately thinks outside the box in his art. He is a magician, a conjurer, an alchemist, an architect. He is a weaver of tales, a maker of worlds within a box.

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Arts Review

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle, May 22, 2009

‘Wood & Steel: Works by Caprice Pierucci
and Randall Reid’
Davis Gallery Through June 27

Randall Reid is breaking rules, literally. Wooden and metal rulers, T squares, and thermometers, along with other found objects, all get chopped into his elegant wall-hanging compositions.

There is something naughty and fun about repurposing a functioning gauge. A tool with a scientific purpose is flipped, cut, and layered. It is rendered impotent, transformed into the realm of “faux science,” into a mere metaphor for an obsolete data system. Reid plays with this concept in certain pieces. Time and Temperature is part of a thermometer holder with very faded paint. Timeline, Crossing the Border, and Gauging a Moment also feature recombined rulers. Reid writes: “The memories are evoked by the textures I create, and they reside within the materials as well. By combining raw and well-worn materials, I seek to give visual form to our relationships with the past.”

Reid uses a steel frame to encompass his materials. He has a distinct sensitivity to texture. He doesn’t create “distressed” surfaces; he cuts them out. Some compositions are built-up frames within frames, which he calls “windows.” The focal point of the piece is a tiny area with a large industrial support and reinforcing shapes, colors, and textures repeated around it. I am reminded of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Alexander Rodchenko, as well as locals such as Steve Brudniak, Barbara Irwin, and Lance Letscher. Battleship Sky drew me in with its red, white, and blue painted metal base shape, because I heart Evel Knievel. Then the title prodded me to notice the dark scratches in the red wood panel above the vibrant stripes. The wear pattern looks like the towers and antennae of a ship. Red Sky at night is a sailor's delight, and this is just a great little piece.

Caprice Pierucci, the other featured artist in “Wood & Steel,” isn’t breaking rulers, but she is bending the rules of woodworking. In her hands, wood looks soft, fuzzy, and flowing. She creates wavy, curving forms that defy function and right angles. They make awesome shadows and feature a very rhythmic and consistent use of negative space. I found myself looking through these interesting gaps and holes. These are mysterious gravity-defying sculptures. I can tell she is gluing boards together, aligning various grains of the wood; she is band-sawing and jigsawing, belt and orbital sanding. It looks like pine, a soft wood, and it looks like she goes at boards with freedom and gusto, letting the grain of each board help determine the final shape. This is the perfect abstract art to hang near natural light and watch the shadows change; hour by hour, they would dance around the piece, changing silhouettes.

Both artists have an intuitive sense of finish texture and overall rhythm. Reid has rusty parts just sitting there rusting and looking great. Pierucci’s airy wood is sometimes clear-coated or stained but also shown unfinished with sawdust drifting through it. Both artists allow the medium to be itself, a bit raw and undisguised. This purity is comforting, and there is no doubt as to the thoughtfulness that went into this exhibition of humble materials elevated to fine art.

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Opening this Weekend:
Randall Reid at Nuart Gallery

by E-Slant Team

recontextualized —
ordered layers

Nuart Gallery
670 Canyon Rd, Santa Fe
April 24, 2009 – May 10, 2009

Infused with a residue of the past, Randall Reid transforms salvaged steel and wood into an intimate and rectangular world. A subtle colorist, Reid’s warm, burnished surfaces are cogently tactile — vestiges of memory and ancient artifact. The artist possesses a virtuoso ability to amend the nature of the scavenged and found materials at hand by altering the appearance of metal to sometimes looks like wood and wood taking on a diversity of other characteristics. In this way, Reid re-contextualizes found objects to create his exquisitely crafted, formalistic abstractions.

In addition to Reid’s sculptural paintings, his studio practices and sources of inspiration (including the artist’s collection of metal and wood antique toys) are the subjects of this exhibition. Graphic designer Michelle Hays has documented his process through photography and collaborated on Reid’s book, “Recontextualized: Ordered Layers,” recently published through a grant from Texas State University — San Marcos.

[Reid was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1956. He has participated in over 300 exhibitions and is represented in the collections of Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts, Austin Museum of Fine Arts, Masur Museum of Fine Arts, and the College of William and Mary.]

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Randall Reid: Visual Poet

by René Paul Barilleaux

Chief Curator/Curator of Art after 1945
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Randall Reid scavenges flea markets, junk shops, and garage sales for materials to make his intimate collages. Reid deconstructs his finds then employs their parts in nearly two-dimensional works, unlike many “artist-pickers” who create assemblages from found objects without significantly altering their appearance. Fragments, once familiar, are often unrecognizable when they are juxtaposed with and/or skillfully joined to elements which the artist fabricates in his studio. Old measuring devices, discarded signs, rusted metal tools-these and similar cast-offs are repurposed as art-making materials and given another life in Reid’s hands.

Using a format of squares or vertical and horizontal rectangles, Randall Reid composes his collages in a highly formal way, either emphasizing their rectilinear structure or playing against right angles. Framing, both literally and figuratively, is critical throughout Reid's art. In addition to the steel frames that surround the perimeters of the pictures, in some works concentric, internal frames draw the viewer to the collage’s center, as if looking through a series of windows or portals. In other compositions, which are either strictly horizontal or asymmetrical, Reid employs texture and line to visually engage and command attention.

Color is used in both restrained and dramatic ways. Elegant earth-toned palettes, nearly monochromatic, contrast with saturated hues and bright color swatches. In some cases typography adds an additional dimension—a single letter or fragment of a word refers to the world outside the work’s frame. While the collages are primarily formal in concept and design, elements such as typography allow outside narrative qualities to quietly creep in.

Above all else, Randall Reid’s collages and assemblages clearly demonstrate his love of materials-humble and unpretentious. On viewing these static works, one senses Reid’s pleasure in actively scouring the shelves and tabletops and bins of flea markets for hours, and the sparks of inspiration he derives from spotting a broken tape measure or old road sign. As a result, the poetic nature of Randall Reid’s creative process is evident as visual poetry in his art.

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