Contemporary Art Quarterly: Richard Aldrich

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"...At the artist’s request, this archive differs in format from the others we’ve published—it includes only installation views."
What is the gallery but the wreath, the coronation, lighting bestowing your anointment like a halo. No gold frames required because white real estate provides the gilt. Installation views that attempt to distance “painting” from the hegemony of its image - to ostensibly preserve it from the porn trading cards they’ve become - seems naive at best. Privatizing it simply finalizes the gallery as the accreditor, art a fiat currency.

see too: Richard Aldrich at Adrian Rosenfeld, Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery, Richard Aldrich at Misako & Rosen, Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace

Richard Aldrich at Misako & Rosen

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No matter how much you make fun of these paintings, they just sort of take it, like dummies, bouncing right back up. Painting as a sponge for blows. Perhaps the best painting is capable of all the lashing in the world. Call these paintings stupid. And they are... but they take it exceedingly well, seem even noble in it. Some paintings whither because they fear stupidity.

Richard Aldrich at Adrian Rosenfeld

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"his ever-accumulating practice."  

Anyone spending any significant time in struggling art students' studios would recognize these experimental searchings, objects-as-attempts, considered less for what they are than the potential in an artistic career, (i.e. it's not contemporarily gleaming right now but it could be polished later if I chose this object-as-trajectory as my career,) the object as long term possibility. It was Aldrich's decision to accumulate rather than throw the fits, recognizing their stupid interest as potentials, each a tangential to the great whale of capital P Painting. Because there's an artist somewhere that does this full-time, which we were all trying to avoid such jobs.  Aldrich's attempts at personally expanding the field of painting attend their comedy-almost by feeling so part-time. Because surely there is actually a fool doing this full time.



See too: Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery

“2021” at Sydney

“2021” at Sydney

The decrepit and artifactual, pieces, there's something lovely forlorn about a single butt of trash like a rose. Good trash will bloom in the sun, wilt in the rain. We aspire to be like its emptiness, it vindicates our cities, we can see the whole world like a lens through the one discarded in the gutter. Trash reflects us, because we're better at deciphering ruins than cultures.


See too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery

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Aldrich's befuddlement of the terms and conditions of paintings makes for obtuse, tangential starts digressing from those painting histories generally acceptable as beginnings. If the paintings seem facetious or frivolous it is because Aldrich doesn't necessarily venerate the histories that are painting cannon, and so which attaching almonds to a painting is not only a thing to do but becomes naturalized as a term of painting - possibly - as all the talk of flatness once was, to be premised as a deduction of the ontological structure of painting rather than some rhetorical hubris, and the distance between the hypothesized normative frame of, say, almonds versus accepted flatness/expression/etc. as premise for painting, and the continual and spiraling versions as potentially acceptable fundamentals of painting and the ones in the book and the distance between these things.