Wholesale Reggie Burrows Hodges: The Reckoning

This body of work from American painter Reggie Burrows Hodges (born 1965) takes reflection as its primary focus: a handheld mirror, the glimmer of a sliding door, a glistening pool. The series has developed over the past three years and comprises the artist’s first solo show in Los Angeles. Built out from Hodges’ signature black ground and rendered in acrylic and pastel, the scenes and figures here emerge through gestural-but-intimate marks of incandescent hues. Throughout the exhibition, as illustrated in this accompanying volume, mirrored surfaces multiply, operating as potent sites of transportation and slippery disappearance. The richly illustrated book, which features essays by curator Jaime DeSimone and writer and curator Hilton Als, breaks from the form of the traditional exhibition catalog to highlight the significance of this body of work as a painted world unto itself. As Als writes, Hodges “begins each work with a flat canvas that he washes in black, a black that is the black of infinity . . . I wonder if in looking into that black sphere—into that infinite—Hodges sees his paintings; that is, maybe his imagination rests in that darkness and rather like a figure out of Cocteau, he reaches into the darkness and pulls dreams out—dreams he realizes through painting.”