"...Reeves sets an overlay of two painting modes, making
no effort to blend them to a consistency of style. Or no effort
that is immediately apparent. She handles each method by its own
authority, each on its own terms, superimposing abstraction and
realism as if neither were aware the other were sharing space
in the same work. Her approach involves her, as well, in a compounded
logic of paint, a double-headed conception of the significance
of orchestrated pigment. The realistic renderings gives us paint
as image, as a representation of something otherwise recognizable,
a reference to something that is not paint, that we have seen
in the world. The abstractions present paint per se, paint that
refers to nothing but itself, that refers to nothing but our knowledge
of formed paint, knowledge we have acquired from our witnessing
of other paintings. Her personal marks point us toward the long
history of painterly designs; her images of barns and scenery
recall us to memories culled from life, remembrances of places
we've been, the things we've done there, and how we felt. We are
simultaneously put into the world of art, of the artificial, and
as well into the world of the real.
Her approach puts her work in the heart of a contradiction. But
contradiction is the heart of her artistic project and the strength
of her work, for there can be no contradiction in painting. Contradiction
is a logical category, not an aesthetic one. A work of visual
art cannot be contradictory, or non-contradictory, for that matter.
What it can be is successfully resolved or unresolved. It can
be an organic whole, or it can be visual chaos.
Reeves' paintings are resolved. Color compositions are consistent
and completed, tonal harmonies are achieved, and the pictorial
composition is balanced, with internal dynamics that are clear
and directed. The abstract forms are made visually cogent with
the illusionistic space. They occur in evident positions in the
fictional world of the landscape or room, and they commit coherent
actions there — they hover in the air, or stand on the foreground,
or peak over the horizon. Spatial consistency is maintained.
As a result, the two painting modes become integrated, not stylistically
but pictorially - they make a single picture. Reeves resolves
not the contradiction, but the painting. And as a result of that,
the two modes of abstraction and representation alter each other.
Each manner transforms the other into an extension of itself.
What had been clearly rendered images begin to appear as pure
configurations of paint. What is more important, abstract forms
start to look like incomprehensible objects occurring in a real
drama, objects inexplicable but as real as trees and fields and
farm houses.
What Reeves accomplishes is timely: a renewed endowment of abstract
forms with reference outside the painting, with the power of representation.
The gestures of post-painterly abstraction — a manner of
painting whose subject has been the matter of painting itself
— become loaded with significances beyond the art form.
Here they are about something other than art, which is a requirement
of all art that aspires to be important, to be truly significant,
to be about something. For a work of art to be about anything
at all, it must be about something beyond art. Otherwise, it is
merely a vicious circle, an activity self-absorbed...
...Faith is doused by discouragement, by loss of heart, and it
is carried to doubt by the completeness of the veneer of the visible
world, that seems to be total, to have no holes, to need no filling
in by something else. The visual tension is appropriate, for faith
goes hard in this world.
It goes by struggle, the struggle to keep heart, to keep fixed
to a vision, to know by a feeling and not by the material facts.
The struggle of faith is constant but hidden, invisible to eyes
of others, locked deep in one's heart, unless the other is an
artist, and then it is evident for the world to see. Reeves' struggle
is to obtain to spirit within the world of matter — the
matter that is the material of her medium, and spirit that can
be found despite all the materials of the world, the spirit that
is hidden from nothing but too often our eyes, and too often our
hearts. In her tangible articulations — her articles of
faith — she wishes to bring to the eyes what is known in
the depths of the soul, to keep it fixed in attention, thick and
pasty like built-up paint, impossible to ignore, or forget, or
doubt. Her struggle is a hope, the hope that spirit may become
evident, remain evident.
Such are two — the faith and the hope. The charity is in
what Reeves has given us by the means and the methods of her art,
the spiritual and aesthetic strategies, which are the same thing
- and it is the greatest of these."
