Dennis Hollingsworth

David Rhodes, Doubled

David Rhodes Studio

David Rhodes | Aletheia , January 18 - March 3, 2024 HIGH NOON GALLERY, 124 Forsyth Street, NYC

David Rhodes | Partita , January 26 - March 1, 2024 HELM CONTEMPORARY, 132 Bowery, NYC

This is a great NYC month for my friend David Rhodes. Two solo exhibitions are up centering on David's paintings are up in the galleries of NYC this month. This is on the heels of a fine group exhibition that he was included in, Beyond the Surface, Westbeth Gallery, New York. A great painter, fine writer, a sensitive soul. David included me in a group exhibition at Hionas Gallery when I first moved to NYC in 2012-13. I met Peter Hiionas and consequently met the artists orbiting his space, a group of intelligent and committed artists all.

"David Rhodes: Reconfiguring the authorship of a painting", Two Coats of Paint, by Adam Simon

"David Rhodes: Alethia", The Brooklyn Rail, by Saul Ostrow

The other day while enroute to my studio in Brooklyn via the D Train, I was thinking about how this moment was special for David, of how we can see David's overall painting endeavors in a dimensional way because of the several venues that now feature his work. So I wrote the following thoughts out. I'm pasting them raw without any edits or refinements.

On The Two Rhodes Exhibitions
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"He was a sceptic, he was young, abstract, and therefore cruel."
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
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David Rhodes is not young
Is David Rhodes a skeptic?
David Rhodes is an abstractionist.
David Rhodes is gentle.

Alethia: uncovering (truth?) revealing? The subtleties of Heidegger, uncovering the blind side of the Western psyche. The central motif in the High Noon exhibition is the space slicing vertically (and of course diagonally, a constant instrument in his paintings), a parting of curtains, a reveal. Is what is being disclosed is actually "The Origin of the Work of Art"? This suggestion is heavy. Is the clearing for the appearance of things in their world, a setting of a stage?

Partita: music composition, originally referring to a single instrument, Bach used it as a synonym for a suite, a collection.

One, a parting. The other, a gathering.
One, a revelation. The other, an interweaving, a society.

The intervals between lines, the thicknesses of lines: we see how they range from edge to edge, we see the frequency, but a pattern among them is elusive. It suggests a signal but resists a decoding. The pattern of lines suggest frequency and frequency suggests waves. A two slit experiment suggests an observer is present, waves collapsing into particles, particles acting in concert as waves.

The ground is as noumemal as a Malevich black square. It is as if we have fallen into the Last Future. (Zero Ten.) The blackness is velvety, there is no color change from one canvas to the next except for a certain shine and a shifting palpable quality. The eyelids close with not even an afterimage in sight... or alternatively, the rays across the inky depth are flashes of an optic nerve. Two moments before and after the performance: first, the silence before the spotlight alights and second after the applause dies. Both are inky black. Both are full of what is to come and what had been.

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PPS: More thoughts arise. An artesian well, Rhodes' work is.

Two categories follow, the issue of representation and abstraction and "fit for purpose":

Rhodes' painting is simultaneously presenting (representational) and non-presenting (abstraction). It is both at once like other things and its own thing. At what point is this simultaneity in balance and in conflict? At what point is this frozen? At what point is this a cunning entrapment? At what point is this abundance or depletion?

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Form Follows Function, as the famous Modernist said. "Fit for purpose" is a British phrase I learned while binging BritBox. There's a classically Modernist economy of means operating in Rhodes' work. Tape goes down, paint splashed on, tape goes up.

Done.
No fat.
Lean.

* Numberless are the world's wonders / But none more wonderful than man / Words and thought rapid as air / He fashions for his use / And his the skill that deflects the arrows of snow / The spears of winter rain / From every wind he has made himself secure / From every wind he has made himself secure / From all but one ... / all but one / In the late wind of death he cannot stand