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In Reggie Burrows Hodges’s portray Slumber Aura, 2022, we see a seated determine from behind, leaning again and looking out into a conceit mirror. The reflection, rendered in swirling acrylic, captures no discernible face, only a patch of black the place one could be. Rising from the velvety darkish floor of the image, the topic’s physique is framed by fields of pastel pink, blue, and cream, articulating a languorous inside area the place, as Hilton Als writes in a textual content for the present, we really feel as if we’re “on the precipice of a dream.”
Slumber Aura is one among fifteen work in Hodges’s newest exhibition, “The Reckoning,” which is haunted by a coterie of nameless figures proven within the act of self-contemplation. The conjoining of facelessness and the gaze brings Hodges deep into dialog with the historical past of portray, with an allegorical strategy (and a deftness of facture) that echoes that of Milton Avery, Jacob Lawrence, Bob Thompson, and Édouard Vuillard, amongst others. Hodges, nevertheless, pushes additional on this physique of labor towards opacity, permitting illustration to melt into abstraction. The outcome will get us again to the gaze. In Ocean Gateway, 2023, what seems at first look to be an individual turns into, with extra time, a figment of our personal projection, coalescing right into a glimmer of legibility solely to break down once more right into a tangle of lavender and white brushstrokes. These are works that concurrently thwart and reward our wanting.
Hodges’s most hanging achievement, although, is what he manages to do with black pigment. He all the time paints an inky floor first, in order that his figures emerge from, and are constituted of, blackness. In doing so, he decouples Blackness as racial id from black as a colour, one which absorbs the entire gentle round it (which makes for particularly stark distinction in Karma’s bright-white, sun-drenched galleries). Shaped of a uniform matte black, Hodges’s figures ought to learn as absent presences, melancholic silhouettes or voids lower from a extra vibrant actuality. However in a approach that’s totally beguiling, and true to black’s formal properties, Hodges’s figures don’t sink into oblivion; they float.
— Andrea Gyorody
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