Blake Rayne
Sutton Lane - Paris, Paris, France
There are four paintings on display at Blake Rayne’s new Sutton Lane exhibition: three on the left wall, one on the right. At first glance these appear to be rather similar - blandly decorative, even. Each is made from three panels of canvas and each panel has been pleated and spray-painted, forming geometric bands that have been sewn together to make the painting. The upper and lower panels are not completely primed along their horizontal edges, so each painting is bracketed by a small stretch of raw canvas. The works are also framed, however, and one notices that not all of the frames are the same: the three paintings on the left wall are framed in white while that on the right is in red. One notices, too, that this highlighted painting is hung much higher than the others. This has the effect not only of again singling it out but also of activating the space between the walls, so that one’s attention moves within each painting as well as between them, looking around the gallery to where — if one hadn’t already noticed — shipping crates are displayed. These block much of the room and mask, or mark, the fourth corner of the gallery.
Rayne’s art is an art of correspondences. The four crates correspond to the four paintings; the marked fourth corner of the four-cornered room corresponds to the single red-framed work; the textile pattern of the paintings corresponds to and reiterates, as if by magnification, the ready-made weave of the canvas. Rayne’s work is also about selection, with painting understood not as an object but rather as a set of (transparent) choices. The artist makes visible the process behind the creation, transport and display of these paintings, beginning with his choice of canvas, continuing with his choice of pleats and folds, then his selection of one band, among many, as they are laid out on his studio floor, and finally his selection of one painting to set apart, on high and in red. Nothing is trumpeted, though; nothing is really ever announced. Despite the artist’s ambition, there is no conceptual blustering, nor any unpleasant display of technical savvy. This is because Rayne’s art is, also, crucially, one of attention and quiet concentration. His palette, with its nuanced tonal range and analytic-cubist twinkling of greys and pale, silvered browns, is indicative. Or look again at the painted textile patterns, which are almost perfectly uninteresting and yet also almost sumptuous, and watch them flicker, almost imperceptibly, between the two. Rayne’s elegance is measured by his closeness to banality. There is another way to say this: the controlled correspondences that Rayne orchestrates are, in Duchamp’s coinage, infra-mince. That is, they are significant precisely because they verge on the almost completely insubstantial.
David Lewis
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