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53 Prado 
When he visited the Prado, the first great museum he had ever visited, Reich was so overwhelmed by what he saw that his first reaction was to give up painting.
He was waiting at the museum door when it opened in the morning and was ejected at closing time -- every day for a week.
He went there many times over a span of 30 years, and he always stared at “Las Meninas” for at least half an hour. See Appendix.
Reich loved to throw together the vulgar and the sublime. A Renaissance portrait becomes cherry pie.
Sacramento Bee writer Victoria Dalkey said his figures “inhabit a dreamland that hovers between nightmare and nocturnal emission.”
Dalkey said the pictures “are not for prudes or people with weak stomachs,” and they were, “by turns humorous, shocking, repulsive and seductive…emanations of the
unconscious [that] challenge conventional notions of beauty, propriety and sexuality.”
She called them the “most unusual and memorable works from Reich’s 50-year artistic career.”
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54 He matched reality with the fakery of advertising, studio photography, high-tech printing. The effect was jarring, Dalkey said.
She saw the effect on the viewer as being “pulled in by Reich’s caressingly affectionate handling of color and surface and then, suddenly, pushed away by the
unexpected visceral intensity of the imagery.”
Dalkey said the work was “both wrenching and liberating…”
“It is work that demands the viewer to experience rather than judge…”
“While there is humor in Reich’s work -- green olives become goggling eyes, butter-
cream roses march across a figure’s midriff, bon-bons turn into curls -- it tends to be a savage humor, the painful kind that is accompanied by a grimace or a wince.
“Simultaneously lyrical and disturbing, sensual and sordid.”
She, like most viewers of the renderings, responded to the raw sexuality and the mingling of flesh with food and animals in some of the images, but like most viewers, missed the underlying polemical element.
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