Kenneth Baker
Saturday, November 4, 2006

Visceral art that pushes out of the comfort zone

...The Reilly buzz: I predict great things for Andrew A. Reilly. His work at Jack Fischer has a cool, unsparing humor that seems just the right instrument for diagnosing what ails us as a culture. The variety of work on view also suggests the needed dexterity.

At a distance, an untitled UltraChrome print looks like a band of compressed colored lines. Up close -- very close -- they come clear as text.

“B2k.,” the top line begins, “wmd. 2pac. 420. 187. 911. 9/11. 411. *69. lol. txt. xoxo.” And so on, line after line, the lines overlapping and forming a colored blur of semiotically distinct particles, each barbed with public and private associations.

Only one work I know really compares: a Saul Steinberg cartoon in which a man looks at a Braque painting that sets off an avalanche of free association, contained in a billowing thought balloon. In Reilly’s pieces, though -- there are several -- it is as if our minds are being read.

Other works on view consist of business cards, something most of us carry, blazoned with characterizations such as “a small man cheated out of his dreams” and “a self-congratulatory alpha male” paired with “a nurturing saint with low self-esteem.”:

The dialectic of resentment and redemption implicit in several of Reilly’s pieces finds its funniest expression in the video, which has nothing to offer everyone...

Back to Andrew Reilly.