REGGIE BURROWS HODGES

Over the course of several months spent traveling through European cities, Hodges created an expansive body of work that engages with both written and unwritten histories, as well as the everyday moments that so often evade representation. Gestures integral to his practice as a whole are visible here, such as his distinctive black ground at once delineating and disintegrating form and environment. The works in Authorities of Reason feature finely wrought allusions to Western art history and architecture, but push past the skin of the paintings and something more nuanced emerges.

Coming face to face, often for the first time, with certain canonical artworks in the cities in which they were made, Hodges reflected on the resonances between the bloodshed recurring as a subject in these historical paintings and the systems of violence that undergird contemporary life. As throughout his practice, however, this dark awareness simmers below the surface of the works, which emerge as delicately rendered impressions of the environments in which Hodges found himself and the art he experienced on this tour. Made in Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, Florence, London, Milan, Paris, Turin, and Venice, Hodges’s scenes materialise like afterimages, the spectral impression of a moment in time. These paintings pivot on quiet or liminal moments amidst over-historicised European grandeur: a certain city’s quality of light; a recollection of smoke curling from a chimney; the flash of white as rowboat oars splinter the calm of a river. A figure, holding an enormous bouquet, framed by an archway; the woven cafe chairs that mediate between street and establishment, that host those who convene or relish solitude; warm-but-alien hotel rooms. These are often private moments, even those that occur in public space. The two figures—lovers?—seated side-by-side on the banks of one of the Dutch city’s famous canals in Thickly Settled (Amsterdam) occupy a realm unto themselves, the river all bruise-hues, their surroundings at once enclosing and opening up for them as the world does in the thick of infatuation.

Hodges builds out his works from canvases drenched in what Hilton Als ’[has] taken to calling Reggie black. . . . the black of infinity—that mysterious and powerful colour that fills caves, for instance, and gives the sensation that the cave once entered will go on and on.’ The pictorial plane across this suite of works is more clearly delineated than in other paintings, with Hodges’s ebony ground forming a shadowy frame around each scene. Environments—both exterior and interior—leak through, as in Blue Ash (Florence), and stain the contours of his figures. This porosity echoes the artist’s approach to history, equal parts generous and critical. Here, Hodges advances a new kind of chiaroscuro, capturing the light cast by memory into darkness.