My Old Flame, Jim Richard’s eleventh exhibition with the Arthur Roger Gallery, features recent paintings and collages that explore the perimeter of utopia and nostalgia, the manipulation and insertion of source imagery, and interior spaces.
Richard has invited artists Steve DiBenedetto and Dike Blair to participate in this exhibition, a curatorial choice highlighting the push and pull of the abstract and the eerily familiar in Richard’s own work.
Richard’s Never Better series suggests the generic response one might give to the question “How are you?”—a response that is as suspiciously idyllic as the manicured yards and just-so split-levels portrayed on his canvases (often in a meticulous, monochromatic range of values). Inspired by the practice of artists who replicate iconic artworks (sometimes down to a single brushstroke, as in the case of Roy Lichtenstein), Richard’s Paintings of Paintings series transforms emotive, brushy paintings into complex systems of flat, floating shapes. These works are not explicitly representative of well-known paintings, but rather stand-ins for what Richard calls the Modernist “look.” Here, the emphasis is on the experience of a painting, frozen in place, like a deer in the headlights.
