Rico Gatson by Miles McEnery Gallery

RICO!GATSON

WARREN ISENSEE

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

RICO GATSON GHOSTS

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

RICO!GATSON"!SPIRITUAL!ABSTRACTION By Antwaun Sargent

The door is Rico Gatson’s chosen canvas. The bright, flat colorful abstractions seen in a series of new paintings meet the resistance of the prefabricated, ready-made object. It allows Gatson to ground his painting practice, conceptually in his training in sculpture and symbolically in what the artist calls “notions of accessibility.” On the doors, he lays down hard-edge geometric shapes and lines that range in hue from psychedelic purple, magenta, and brown to the pale!e of Pan-African self-determination: red, green, black, orange, and yellow. This hypnotic play with the spectrum of color conjures the politics of independence, liberation, and peace of the 1960s and ’70s in a graphic language that emanates in lines, circles, triangles, and rectangles that form stars, fires, diamonds, and rainbows. On the wooden panels, this can all be seen as a metaphor: For the artist, the vibrantly painted symbols on the doors are abstract representations of the spiritual possibilities of energy. A door gives way to the doorway, a passage, and a place of witness and transformation, a portal to the before of lineage and history and the beyond of the occult and mysticism. His geometric abstractions, represented in works such as Untitled (Freedom Rainbow) (2020), a visualization of the symbol fla!ened into an archway or threshold of thick loops of black, red, orange, green, and yellow, are his “literal envisioning of bodies moving through space as energy.” He explains: “I like to switch between the representation of the literal figure and colorful rays. It becomes less accessible, an abstraction, but I’m always thinking about the figure.”

In his view, the pale blue sky that is seen through the yellow band of color is separated by “space that allows you through, which can symbolically mean moving from one state to another.” This salvation of transformation is indescribable for him “in terms of legacy, in terms of meaning, in terms of feeling,” so he represents its awesomeness in the freedom of the fullness of the rainbow.

Over the course of the last three decades, Gatson has developed a language that includes video, sculpture, collage, and painting, and that has been chiefly concerned with the icons and symbols of racism, trauma, and power. For instance, Whipping Post (Medium) is a 2006 sculpture of a wooden cross with holes that evokes a stockade. The work is painted using a limited pale!e of purple, brown, orange, and amber arranged in a linear configuration that suggests a Ghanaian textile design. It is a symbol of hate, layered with a symbol of pride, both suggesting heritage and legacy. The artist developed his interest in color and geometric symbols while studying graphic design and Fine Art as an undergraduate in the 1980s. He started experimenting with the formal simplicity of Minimalism and Constructivism under the direction of the Minimalist sculptor David von Schlegell while he was a graduate student in the Yale School of Art’s sculpture program. “When I moved to New York in the early ’90s, my head was exclusively concerned with sculpture,” he says. “But I was always utilizing paint or painting objects, and so that was something that was an aspect of the work. While teaching in the post-baccalaureate program at Brandeis University, I began working with a lot of painters, and started thinking more two-dimensionally.” The new works are rooted more squarely in the abstract mysticism of Hilma af Klint and the vivid Minimalism of Carmen Herrera. They seem to be less concerned with symbols of darkness than they are interested in the meditative quality and promise of light. In works such as Untitled (Magic Diamonds) (2020) and Untitled (Ghosts A!er Albert Ayler) (2020) symbols dance on the canvas with the suggestion of what Gatson calls “the esoteric.”

“In the Albert Ayler piece, I’m thinking about ghosts, or spirits. I’m thinking about this person who lived, who passed tragically a#er commi!ing suicide, and thinking about literally his artistic production as a jazz musician, his working abstractly pushing the boundaries of experimentation almost to this point where it’s almost not even music. So to me that piece has a lot of intuitive energy that is contained within the forms I paint, those triangles. It’s about spirituality.” In other works such as Untitled (Transparent Bodies) (2020) and Untitled (Young Mystics), he explains that the triangle is also the central symbol: “The triangle for me is a symbol that represents any number of things historically, but in a nutshell, it’s a symbol of good and evil. The upright position traditionally represents good, and the subverted one represents evil. I like the idea of this occurring in both directions in the works. Deconstructing symbols over the course of my career, specific forms have come to have specific meaning, but they also kind of dissolve in the repetitive rendering. I am trying to subvert or play with symbols of power. Obviously, the triangle references the pyramid form, but then if you flip it an “X” appears, and that becomes a form in the work that represents a lot of diﬀerent stuﬀ. For me, it’s about considering the transformation of something from one state to another.” The work is also part of a lineage that includes the social abstraction of Black Arts Movement figures like Joe Overstreet, whose painting North Star (1968), like Gatson’s own Untitled (North Star) (2020), explores the spatial and textural possibilities of painting and complex cultural histories. In his painting, Gatson realizes the brightest star in the constellation of Ursa Minor in the proud colors of Pan-Africanism. This gesture alludes to the antebellum lore of the Black people who are believed to have followed the light, a beacon of hope, from enslavement to freedom. In

Gatson’s star, as is seen in his flag, Untitled (Flag III) (2020), he eschews the tricolor of red, green, and black, notably represented in David Hammons’s celebrated, African American Flag (1990). Gatson’s interest seems to lie in a more expanded color scheme that includes gold and orange, filling space with more vibrancy and symbolizing what the artist calls the “ever expanding” nature of the light of freedom and emancipation. He explains: “I am processing what it means to have lived through the last four years, and being a person of color in America, issues around citizenship, and who it belongs to. So the flag is just playing with that. The statement of the symbol represents something specific, and in playing with it hopefully provokes a li!le contemplation. The flag is a question, a proposition.” 8

A similar impulse is at play in Untitled (Young Mystics) (2020), which was made while the artist watched “the power and energy of the youth” who led the recent Black Lives Ma!er protests. The work of intersecting large vibrant triangles and small circles against a backdrop of horizontal black and white lines that form smaller upside-down triangles, is an illustration of how repetition, perception, and variation can shi# meaning and capture transformation. The work alludes to the rigorous Minimalism of Sol LeWi!’s wall drawings. Like LeWi!, Gatson employs a limited and specific repertoire of lines, colors, and geometric representations, creating works of visual complexity. Gatson’s language of color and shape is drawn from an African-American sensibility to create optical, repeated pa!erns that have a calming, meditated quality. “There’s a fast and slow thing that occurs within the work,” notes the artist. “The pa!ern and color are spatially active to the point that I hope the loudness produces a focus that slows the viewer down.” Gatson’s exploration of the transformative possibility of color and shape developing into energy and light surfaces in his earlier ongoing series of collages entitled, Icons (2007–). The series pays homage to what he calls “Black Cultural Beacons” and goes beyond their political and cultural

production. In this body of work, Gatson extracts black-and-white images of civil rights leaders, musicians, actors, and writers from found photographs and recreates them against straight mesmeric rays of color, as if they were suns at the center of their own universes. This work and earlier paintings such as Kathleen Cleaver (2006), a silhoue!e of former Black Panther leader painted in the style of kente cloth, evokes the political agitprop of Emory Douglas, the Black Panther Party’s minister of culture whose graphic art illustrated the aims and a!itudes of the Black Power Movement in the group’s newspaper. Gatson’s art represents a notable departure from Douglas’s works on paper, in that it lies conceptually in a liberatory politics that is achieved through a spiritual positivity. In Nina (2007), Gatson depicts the songstress of the civil rights era squa!ing with her hands folded in a moment when she seems weary. He resolves that tension in the image by coloring thin beams of soaring black, brown, orange, and red behind her Afro that seems to be resounding through space. There is no piano and no stage, just the figure with her essence emanating. The series is a representation of Black Power personified, yet in rendering the cultural and political leaders—in black and white with small streaks of color emanating from their being—outside the frames of the moments that defined them, Gatson seems to be asking: Who is Nina Simone without her hits? Muhammad Ali without the ring? Amiri Baraka without his words? Ntozake Shange without the theater? The cu!ing away of the figures from their known and popular contexts of talent and admiration allows us to see them beyond the surface of their labor. As Gatson’s lines of light remind us, they are eternal energy, forces of good, ever radiating.

Antwaun Sargent is writer based in New York City. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vice, and other publications. Sargent is the author of “The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion” (New York: Aperture, 2019) and the editor of “Young, Gi#ed and Black: A New Generation of Artists” (New York: DAP, 2020).

Nelson, 2020