Richard Rezac
Richard Rezac, Untitled (04-04), 2004, Painted wood and aluminum, 20.5 x 19.75 x 3.75 inches.
Richard Rezac
RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY
Giorgio Vasari’s tale about how Paolo Uccello would sit at his desk late into the night, drawing obsessively, refusing his wife’s entreaties to come to bed, muttering, “What a sweet mistress is this perspective,” vividly describes the fascination that geometry holds for some artists. It can become something of a fixation, this immersion in a parallel universe of perfect order, the ceaseless tweaking and elaboration of the architectonics of form, the testing of line in pursuit of visual balance that rapidly becomes a compulsion. In his modestly scaled sculptures and drawings, Richard Rezac scrupulously pursues such states of being, discovering secret harmonies, the tender poetics that can be drawn out of the shapes that surround us, the visual subtleties embedded in the ordinary.
Recently, Rezac has been finding raw material in vernacular architecture, in the design of commercial fixtures and moldings, in decorative wall trim, banister rails, and shelving. Rezac takes these habitually overlooked background elements and subjects them to a process of investigation and embellishment, of parsing and reconsideration, that leaves his final work only vestigially connected to its source. Whether Untitled (05 – 05), 2005, for example, is actually derived from egg-and-dart molding or a wallpaper pattern is ultimately less critical than Rezac’s permutations of and extrapolations from it, meandering intersecting rows of diamond shapes that seem to be following a loose, unwritten set of rules.
Read full article at artforum.com