SEARCHLIGHTS AND SEURAT
Currently on exhibit
“Complex Uncertainties: Artists in Postwar America“
Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia
“…The searchlight effect of Hollywood premiere lights is what Reich’s paintings instantly evoke, but their apparent structure is about pigment: how it’s applied, how it interacts. His colors: the primaries plus green….Reich applies his paint dot by dot with a squeeze bottle to achieve a controlled, precise pointillism. The results are deliriously optical, but not in the sense that they bewilder the eye with dramatic color collisions; on the contrary: Reich’s colors (to submit to a musical as well as color metaphor) are all the same key, the same value…
“…Reich’s paintings tell you how to read them; they’re serious, clear, there’s no pussyfooting. They have a narrative, or, if you will, dramatic, content: each color “originates” in its own band running parallel to, later caroming, mixing and diffusing with, the other three bands of color, like so many multicolored billiard balls across the canvas….”
Carrie Rickey in ArtForum, November 1978
