In the painting by Reggie Burrows Hodges aura of sleep, 2022, we see a figure seated from behind, leaning back and looking into a vanity mirror. The reflection, rendered in swirling acrylic, captures no discernible face, just a speck of black where one would be. Emerging from the dark, velvety background of the image, the subject’s body is framed by fields of pastel pink, blue and cream, articulating a languid inner space where, as Hilton Als writes in text for the show, we feel like we’re “on the edge of a dream”.
aura of sleep is one of fifteen paintings in Hodges’ latest exhibition, “The Reckoning”, which is haunted by a coterie of unnamed figures shown in the act of self-contemplation. The conjunction of facelessness and gaze plunges Hodges into a deep conversation with the history of painting, with an allegorical approach (and craftsmanship) that echoes that of Milton Avery, Jacob Lawrence, Bob Thompson and Édouard Vuillard, among others. Hodges, however, pushes further in this body of work towards opacity, allowing representation to soften into abstraction. The result brings us back to the look. In ocean walkway, 2023, what at first appears to be a person becomes, with more time, the fruit of our own projection, fused into a glow of readability only to crumble back into a tangle of lavender and white brushstrokes. These are works that both thwart and reward our gaze.
Hodges’ most striking achievement, however, is what he manages to do with black pigment. He always paints an ink background first, so that his figures emerge and are made up of blackness. In doing so, he decouples blackness as a racial identity from black as a color, a color that absorbs all the light around it (which creates a particularly stark contrast in the stark white galleries awash with sun of Karma). Formed from a uniform matte black, Hodges’ figures should be read as absent presences, melancholy silhouettes or voids cut off from a more vibrant reality. But in a way that is utterly seductive and faithful to the formal properties of black, Hodges’ figures do not sink into oblivion; they float.
