JUBG

Reena Spaulings

Info: For Keep On Truckin’, Reena Spaulings has produced a series of cut-out paintings that repeat a specific hieroglyphic shape, somewhere between a figure and a made-up letter. In fact, this shape comes from a scan of a piece of trash found on the streets of Manhattan: the discarded, flattened-out paper packaging for a set of Apple EarPods. When the shape is rotated ninety degrees, four distinct signs can be articulated with each turn. For two of the paintings, this found sign-figure is combined with a cut-out acrobat taken from Matisse. The cut-out rearticulates painting via a hard Egyptian contour, allowing Reena Spaulings to lure painting back from the window-like space of realism, Surrealism, etc. Here, abstraction becomes a sort of figure, and the figure acts like a letter that recodes space. The flattened-out, rotated hieroglyph serves as a vehicle and support for everything else that makes the paintings paintings: color and gesture, speed and light, chaos and kitsch. Monochromatic color schemes evoke the four seasons.