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63  "I have made easy pieces of utterly familiar objects: Flesh folds, turtle-neck sweaters, corn away from the cob, hair, pieces of magazine illustrations, painted toes and even Karl Malden’s rumpy nose.”
Roger Clisby, the Crocker curator, enjoyed Reich’s occasional references to the Italian Renaissance in this work. But these
and other recognizable references are neither celebrations nor parodies.
Wild scale shifts remind us of the artifice of art. Punning titles, often irrelevant to the seeming and/or screaming content, echo the labyrinthine metaphysics
Reich said, “If there appears to be any lack of ready identity, that comes from making only a piece of relentless realism and not more.”
If viewers try to read symbolism and other meaning into the results, they should proceed with caution.
The artist is saying his interest is only in the visual, but the overall effect is an intellectual workout.
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64 Flatness Reich’s work was an example of the struggle that began at least 20,000 years ago -- whether and how to depict three-dimensional space and objects on a flat surface.
I lay on my back in the cave at Santander, where Neolithic artists used the contours of the rock to enhance the realism of aurochs buttocks, and I realized that those artists were just as intellectually advanced and subtle as we.
I stared at Giotto’s geometrically ambitious frescoes in Padua. Don Reich knew all about this, but he adhered to flatness, and the cut edges he drew mocked the idea of plasticity. Even in abstracts of the same period,
Reich suggests an image taken up and fitted onto a flat white ground.
The layering and layering of thin layers of flatness enhances and engraves flatness
on perception. With a master of line like Reich, geometry rules the picture plane and pictures become symphonies of line -- line that he saw so clearly before he drew it.
The drawn line that became a cut line that became a drawn cut line.
Colors are subdued. These are statements, not just sentences.
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