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 are articulated, almost an alphabet. The final move was to join our found sign-figure with an acrobat taken from a Matisse cut-out.
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. We are now in the dimension of the code, or sign-space. 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 the paintings, these two figures combine sometimes to form an abstract monster. Using a technique invented in Los Angeles by Albert Oehlen, Spaulings adheres these hybrid sign-creatures 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.
