Reggie Burrows Hodges

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.”

Over several months spent traveling through Europe, American painter Reggie Burrows Hodges (born 1965) 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. Finely wrought allusions to Western art history and architecture emerge in works that pivot on quiet or liminal moments: 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, the woven café chairs that mediate between street and establishment. Environments—both exterior and interior—leak through 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.

A tennis ball, warped by the speed of impact, is captured right before it lands on the painted boundary of the court, its oblong shape conveyed through negative space—a window into the black ground with which Maine-based American artist Reggie Burrows Hodges (born 1965) treats his canvases. This is movement as observed by a hawkeye, a painterly strategy particular to his paintings.
Hodges' atmospheric memory paintings feature scenes sourced from his childhood in 1970s Compton, California. In this fully illustrated volume, Hodges constructs a grammar of tiled floors, wallpaper, tennis courts, patterned robes and sports uniforms. With a delicate touch, he captures glimpses of the past and renders them hazy and indistinct, laden with the tension of personal memory. Guided by this painterly approach, Hodges creates gentle and profound emotional collisions that ripple throughout his work.

Maine-based painter Reggie Burrows Hodges (born 1965) explores storytelling and visual metaphor, often drawing inspiration from his childhood in Compton, California. Starting from a black ground, Hodges develops the scene around his figures, who materialize in the recessive space with foggy, ethereal brushwork.
Hodges' figures are "forms that are made sharper, and more haunting, not because we see those things in their eyes, but because we see it in their bodies, their postures, the endless desire for humans not to be alone, and to connect," Hilton Als writes. "To that Hodges adds all that wonderful blackness."
This fully illustrated catalog features a selection of works made between 2019 and 2020; a newly commissioned essay by Hilton Als; and an interview between the artist and Suzette McAvoy, Executive Director at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.