Reena Spaulings presents a new series of cut-out paintings that repeat a specific hieroglyphic shape, somewhere between a figure and a 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 earbuds. When the shape is rotated ninety degrees, four distinct signs can be articulated, almost an alphabet. The final move was to join our found sign-figure with a cut-out acrobat taken from Matisse.
The cut-out rearticulates painting via a hard “Egyptian” contour, allowing Reena Spaulings to steal painting back from the window-like space of realism, Surrealism, etc. Abstraction becomes a sort of figure and the figure is 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, etc.
A cut-out acrobat becomes ensnared within the articulations of a rotating sign-apparatus, or perhaps leaps out and escapes. Almost a dance, almost an allegory. In some paintings, the two figures combine to form an abstract monster, which can also be rotated. Using a technique invented in Los Angeles by Albert Oehlen, unstretched canvases are adhered directly to the wall with rubber cement, like giant stickers. Others are mounted on wooden supports to give them a more sculptural presence in the space.
