Ideas (cont.) — Scott Reeder

CANADA is pleased to present Ideas (cont.), a one-person exhibition by Scott Reeder, his second with the gallery.Scott Reeder’s new paintings pose questions: what is acceptable subject matter for art and how absurd can something become if an idea is carried to the edges of logic and good taste? This boundary pushing exhibition includes list paintings, abstract works, and portraits of skeletons and dogs doing human stuff. Throughout, the artist’s position in relation to these different modes of painting is a central conceit.Whether enjoying the temperate climes of the south of France with a glass of white wine on the veranda or lost in revery while surfing the web late at night, Reeder’s dogs are both totally alone yet completely comfortable in their own fur. It’s hard not to ascribe feelings and personalities to Reeder’s canine subjects. There is a whiff of the fraught psychological space that painters, such as Matisse, had for their models who served as formal props and objects of fantasy and desire. In fact, Reeder quotes Matisse’s Interior with Etruscan Vase (1940), including the tipped up black tabletop, potted philodendron and a dog with glasses who is the spitting image of Henri himself. Dogs and their settings are rendered with lush colors, lively brushwork and considered compositions reminiscent of Pierre Bonnard, whose sun-dappled palette gave his paintings a patterned effect that made his imagery hover between solidity and vapor. Reeder also adds a couple of list paintings into the mix, perhaps his most well-known sub-genre. They look and feel like “conceptual” paintings—think John Baldassari or Kay Rosen, with jokes that lean playful and wry. With headings like weed names or a to-do list for a yet to be made abstract painting, Reeder’s handwritten notations cast light the weirder parts of his mind. Not mere jokes, though they are that, the lists address issues of image versus language and whether “ideas” are even valid in visual art.The abstractions are both casual and sincere, suggesting that Reeder may be in the vicinity of lyricism at least the zip code. A voracious looker, Reeder has expressed a love of Mary Heilman’s work and her confidence in laying down large blocks of buoyant color for the love of a particular hue. In the same spirit Reeder continues his investigation of non-image driven painting. He collages and upcycles drawings from his studio walls and floor onto his canvases along with splats of acrylic that gives the paintings a democratic unruliness. His willingness to tweak the sacred pillars of painting (especially the fidelity to a signature style) could be read as thinly veiled aggression, but the show maintains a buoyantly positive attitude. This quality is a particularly appealing part of Reeder’s work, recalling the perpetually put upon but always game irony of Bob Newhart.Whatever subject he chooses, the real motif is the complexity of art objects and their relationship to a maker. Reeder’s individualism runs through the work, always responding to the strangeness around him. Such absurdity calls to mind Rene Magritte, an artist and a movement of one, especially his later Vache paintings. In a break from his well-known style Magritte, at the height of his career, painted 30 or so stream of consciousness paintings derived from cartoons and popular imagery. Painted in a roughly economical style they pointed to an urgent creative flowering and a willingness to tweak his audience. Reeder’s work has blossomed similarly, full of the drama of odd hours and situations, fueled by the pleasures and pain of being attentive to the follies of life.Scott Reeder (b. 1970, Battle Creek, MI; lives and works in New York, NY) received his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and his BFA from the University of Iowa. He was in residence at Skowhegan in 1995. He is in numerous collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Walker Art Center. Reeder is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Reeder has exhibited widely over the past two decades, with solo and two person exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; CANADA, New York, NY; Saenger Galería, Mexico City; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, NY; 356 Mission, Los Angeles, CA; Marlborough, New York, NY; Lisa Cooley, New York, NY; Kavi Gupta, Chicago, and Berlin; Luce Gallery, Torino, Italy; Daniel Reich Gallery, New York, NY; Pat Hearn Gallery, NY; among others.