Alan Reid — Poison Pen
Alan Reid’s canvases are replete with lush intertextuality, stacking pictorial devices, ideological
fragments, and slyly deranged missives stammering with the vestiges of a waning education class elevated into
multifaceted enigma. Each painting signals sparkling with the refined syntaxes of a dandy interloping through the
cultural economies of advanced capital, possessed of a gait and manner simultaneously Edwardian and futurist.
Bruising nomenclature’s contingency on context to decipher the differences between esoterica and absurdism, Reid’s
latest body of work is an eclectic reading list comprising Freudian slips, cognitive rhymes, and other unlikely
juxtapositions in service to the associative or even the suggestive: amidst the plush frippery issue variously
indirect yet potent indications of thick erotic subtext and the sadism of signification.
With delicacy and precision, Reid handles his medium’s unwieldy past, marred with its various shady run-ins with
image, muddied in the yawning mote around representation through which an anxious rush of longing, stressed
veracities, partial truths, and tumultuous capacities for fantasy pass. Reid crossbreeds genre the way one might
cultivate a new kind of rose, coaxing acute literacies from pulpy, subcultural references and effecting expansive
readings from the most anecdotal of imbricated fragments. The paintings insinuate parts of their own bibliography,
with Baudelaire and Paul Bowles invoked explicitly—and one might infer the likes of John Giorno, Broodthaers,
Mallarmé, the Bloomsbury Group, Martine Aballéa, and Francesco Vezzoli as others in a boho intellectual rogues
gallery just beyond this or that painting’s trompe l’oeil fringed curtain.
And yet, as quasi-scholarly as these paintings appear, their content is as much concerned with style as with content.
Fluttering among conventions of advertising, packaging, book covers, promotional signage, Warholian razzle dazzle,
and fashion statements, Reid softly, cosmetically, blends painting’s penchant for registering desire with a chicly
disaffected approach to the epistemological wherein knowledge is coextensive with a certain panache of form. Offhanded
decadence and dry wit in equal measure, Reid’s montage paintings are productive speculations into modes of address,
probing as much the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of speech acts as the ‘what.
These are works that politely request curiosity—even sleuthing—from their audiences, all the while entangling their
suave appearances in a complex underlying poetic system which privileges the paraphilia of the peripheral. Sidelong
glances, armchair philosophies, flirtations, guesswork, wishes, seating assignments, ransom notes, effete malaises,
and inside jokes are the comportment of Reid’s visual paragons. These paintings and their texts and their surfaces
and their implications treat quizzicality as timeless accessory par excellence.
— text by Matt Morris
Exhibition flyer design by Matthew Brannon
Alan Reid,
Poison Pen,
Installation View
Alan Reid,
Poison Pen,
Installation View
Alan Reid,
Les Fleurs du Mal,
2023, Acrylic on linen, 30h x 22w in.
Alan Reid,
Les Fleurs du Mal,
detail view
Alan Reid,
Poison Pen,
Installation View
Alan Reid,
Body Language,
2023, Acrylic on linen, 26h x 19w in.
Alan Reid,
Body Language,
detail view
Alan Reid,
The Tortured Artist of Saint-Tropez,
2023, Acrylic on linen, 28h x 21w in.
Alan Reid,
The Tortured Artist of Saint-Tropez,
detail view
Alan Reid,
Poison Pen,
Installation View
Alan Reid,
Poison Pen,
Installation View
Alan Reid,
Paul Bowles,
2023, Acrylic on linen, 20h x 28w in.
Alan Reid,
Paul Bowles,
detail view
Alan Reid,
Yes!,
2023, Acrylic on linen, 50h x 36w in.
Alan Reid,
Yes!,
detail view
Alan Reid,
Poison Pen,
Installation View
Alan Reid,
CTRL+ALT+DELETE,
2023, Acrylic on linen, 29h x 21w in.
Alan Reid,
CTRL+ALT+DELETE,
detail view
Alan Reid,
Poison Pen,
Installation View
Alan Reid,
Poison Pen,
Installation View
Alan Reid,
Poison Pen,
Installation View
Alan Reid,
An Afterlife in Acapulco,
2023, Acrylic on linen, 26h x 20w in.
Alan Reid,
An Afterlife in Acapulco,
detail view
Alan Reid,
The Pursuit of Happiness,
2023, Acrylic on linen, 50h x 36w in.
Alan Reid,
The Pursuit of Happiness,
detail view
Alan Reid,
Poison Pen,
Installation View
Alan Reid,
Italian Summer Abroad,
2022, Acrylic on linen, 27h x 20w in.
Alan Reid,
Italian Summer Abroad,
detail view
Alan Reid,
Poison Pen,
Installation View