Pages 1 to 10 Pages 11 to 20 Pages 21 to 30 Pages 31 to 40 Pages 41 to 50 Pages 51 to 60 Pages 61 to 70 Pages 71 to 80 Pages 81 to 90 Pages 91 to 100 Pages 101 to 110 Appendix 1 to 13

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27


Icons

There were certain recurring icons, including dogs and other animals, circles, houses and grommets. I don’t know what symbolic meanings these themes had for him, if any.
Shapes, images and geometry came so easily to him that they seemed expressions simply of masterful facility. He liked doing them, I think. Bravura.
The grommet, a small, round mechanical object to attach other objects, like the limbs of a paper doll, turns up often, with at least one purpose. While Reich knew all about geometric perspective, aerial perspective, foreshortening and all that, the grommet quietly tells us that it’s flat, it’s all flat, and it’s everlastingly flat as he would say, it's all made up..
His frequent use of the grommet is typical of his attention on flatness -- metallic, mechanical, thick, casting its own shadow and, most assertively, declaring that the form on which the grommet appears is just a made-up flat form. A drawing or painting, not a picture.
Still, there was often a dynamic between the realistic and the wholly abstract. The thick and the flat.

28



Metallic Plant, 1989


Marionettes, 2000


Sagrada Familia, 2006

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