As if by Osmosis, Lucas Reiner by Candida Stevens Gallery

As

if by Osmosis

LUCAS REINER

12 Northgate, Chichester West Sussex PO19 1BA 07794 416569

info@candidastevens.com www.candidastevens.com @candida_stevens

Candida Stevens Gallery is delighted to present ‘As if by Osmosis’, a joint exhibition of new works by Kerry Harding, an English painter based in North Cornwall, and Lucas Reiner, an American painter with studios in Los Angeles and Porto. Both artists look to their surroundings for inspiration, focusing on the same subject matter for months or even years at a time. In Harding’s case, this is the coastal landscape that wraps around her and for Reiner it is the growth of trees within urban environments. Through these acts of sustained observation both artists have absorbed the ways in which external factors such as the weather, seasons, time and human intervention affect their subject matter, developing an understanding and connection that goes far beyond the visual. This level of intimacy is evident in their paintings, which soothe and disarm the viewer in equal measure.

Integral to both artists is the way they embrace the permeability of their chosen fabrics. Harding will often find the starting point for a new work on the back of existing canvases, guided by the marks that oils and bleaches have made from seeping through the canvas. A fortuitous incident earlier this year for Reiner, meanwhile, has led to an unorthodox approach to tempera painting on muslin, in which he applies preparatory gesso to the back of the fabric, pushing the substance through the weave to produce an irregular painting surface. For both artists, the element of chance and surrendering control to their materials is an important aspect of how they infuse their paintings with history and character.

Sharing the same earthly palette of blues, greys, yellows and reds, intriguing parallels between the ways both artists work begin to reveal themselves and provide an enriched viewing experience. The fragmentary and abstracted nature of Reiner’s work is complemented by the timeless and otherworldly feel of Harding’s landscapes. These are paintings not defined by the physical elements they represent but by the interaction between and sense of magnitude embedded in the shapes and layers used to form them.

Showing with Candida Stevens Gallery for the first time, Lucas Reiner is known for his distinctive depictions of singular urban trees that invite contemplation on a range of themes, including the passing of time and human relationships with nature. His early work, Los Angeles Trees (2001-2012), explored the ways in which trees planted in urban environments serve as a metaphor for the futility of human desire to control nature and, in turn, the resilience of nature to respond to such attempts. More recently, Reiner has begun to consider clusters of trees in his compositions, examining the ways in which the tree structures interact and connect spaces beneath and between them, and the ways in which their presence can be understood through the abstraction of these forms.

Reiner’s new series, Benito Juárez, is named after the airport in Mexico City outside which the artist noticed small groves of trees positioned amidst the concrete and tarmac of the airport’s entrance. Planted, presumably, to soften this harsh urban landscape, there is an irony to the topiary of these trees, the canopies of which have been shaped into perfect cubes and rectangles held up in the air and denied their organic forms. Although initially drawn to their presence as further examples of the human desire to control nature, it was the beauty in the interconnectivity of their forms and potential symbolism held within those spatial relationships that Reiner felt compelled to explore.

Building on themes he began considering in Inglewood Cathedral (2023), in which the artist explored the idea that trees along a boulevard could function as the doorway to a sacred space in their formation of light-filtered passageways and arches, Reiner considered the spaces that exist between and beneath the canopies of the Benito Juárez trees. He noticed how the forms could be read as an abstracted representation of human relationships, in which their interactions could be seen to symbolise obstruction, support or space, depending on the subjective reading of its viewer.

Taking this line of inquiry further, Reiner followed cubist principles in reducing the three-dimensional forms to their geometric shapes and flattening perspective to remove any sense of foreground and background. The result is a series of intriguingly delicate paintings in which the trees no longer form the focus and instead exist as impressions on a landscape, ranging from silhouettes to ghostly imprints. Presented almost as cross-sections of earth, expanses of yellow beneath the trees remind us of their connection to the soil below, whilst tree and sky are shown as unified forms that merge and alternate until there is little left to differentiate them. In these works, we are reminded that there can be no preclusion of trees from nature, regardless of the incongruity of their placement.

Painted onto hand-cut pieces of muslin mounted onto wood, each work in the series differs slightly in size and shape that reflect the individuality of the trees they portray. Incomplete borders and cropped compositions emphasise their fragmentary appearance, appearing almost as historical artefacts of a larger story within history. Transcending the boundary between painting and object, Reiner’s interest in religious icons reveals itself. Indeed, there is one particular work, the Icon of the Triumph of Orthodoxy (c1400), housed in the British Museum, that captivates him. Featuring two saints holding icons and the Icon of the Hodegetria (depicting the Madonna and Child) protected by guardian angels, this small wooden panel celebrates the moment in Byzantine orthodoxy when veneration of the icon as a sacred image returned. This belief in the power of imagery to have agency over the viewer resonates with Reiner. Having focused for so many years on the ways in which trees are governed by human intervention, he has begun to question whether their identity can in fact be detached from the anthropomorphised viewpoint to which we are programmed to read nature (and the representation of nature in art), to the point where such trees can be appreciated for their agency alone.

Essay by Isabella Joughin