JOHN REYNOLDS – In the street I was lost… – 24 March-26 June, 2020

In the street l was lost…

Samuel Beckett
The End.

‘…. as if the landscape
Had plans to be a Nolan.
The desolation of it. ‘

Clive James
The River in the Sky

With his Christchurch exhibition In the street l was lost… John Reynolds extends his ongoing ‘Lost Hours’ series, which ponders the fateful disappearance of Colin McCahon in Sydney on the eve of his Biennial
retrospective, I Will Need Words, in early April 1984.
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John Gribbin writes in his introduction to quantum physics, Six Impossible Things, that we might understand the world, the mysteriousness of our world, with six fundamental ‘solaces’.
He summarises the first ‘scientifically realised and commonly endorsed’ formulation thus:

One: The world does not exist unless you look at it.

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In his recent book A Month in Sienna, Hisham Matar contemplates local pre-Renaissance paintings and asks, ‘… maybe what an artist wants (perhaps every painter and photographer across time) – is to make a flat surface give way, to open up space.’

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Two. Particles are pushed around by an invisible wave. But the particles have no influence on the wave.

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Reynolds plays out a diagrammatic mapping on twilight grounds with this new series of works on paper and a singular panoramic unstretched linen painting.

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Three. Everything that could possibly happen does, in an array of parallel realities.

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Pondering disorientation and blurred geographies, Reynolds rehearses an elongated criss-crossing motif, suggesting precarious architectural profiles, or frayed lines from a ‘stairway to heaven’ tukutuku panel.
Signalling perhaps a kind of nervy or cryptic GPS historiography.

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Four. Everything that could possibly happen has already happened and we only noticed part of it.

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A pedestrian clocking of the Red Zone blurs with Woolloomooloo’s Cross
Street, Auckland’s K Rd and the Loop in the Lone Kauri Road, in a entanglement of location and time.

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Five. Everything influences everything else instantly, as if space does not exist.

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Francis Bacon remarked, “The job of the artist is to deepen the mystery. “

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Six. The future influences the past.

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Or as William Faulkner observed, “The past is not dead. It is not even past.”

(John Reynolds, February 2020)

Paintings on paper