In his 2005 Oakville Galleries exhibit “Drawing Painting,” Reeves established the methodology of his current practice. He photographed Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Tower of Babel and then painted a small study of the Flemish masterpiece; the study became the source of two new drawings, one small and the other monumental. The wall-sized drawing, which measures nearly six by eight feet, is a strangely hybridized and magnified variation of the original work. By transposing the image from one medium to another and faithfully copying the lines created in his studies, Reeves reduces the figurative content of the original to an overwhelming linear mass that nonetheless manages to convey the weight and grandeur of the Bruegel. Yet Reeves’s meticulous translation of each brush stroke from his painted sketch into a set of individual lines in the final drawing lends an odd layer of literalism. What we are witnessing is not only a copy of a painting, but the copying of a painterly surface. The interplay of the iconic original image and the surface details of the copied copy create a new kind of representational tension.
It is no accident that the Tower of Babel would serve Reeves well as a starting point. A myth about an ancient society with an all-encompassing system of signification (a single universal language), Babel resurfaced in the 20th century as a cautionary tale about the perils of totalitarian ideologies and the necessity of interpretation. In taking apart the visual iconography of the tower, however, Reeves reduces this monument of misguided hubris to its linear components. It’s just a bunch of lines, after all, he is saying, in the same way we might conclude that language is really only a string of phonemes and consonants. Yet the original outline and grandeur persist, if in transmuted form.
Reeves’s method of translating a given work into another medium and then tampering with the scale has been the central focus of his practice. In the series Canada Geese, he translates the famously assured and rapid brush strokes of Tom Thomson into pencil drawings. Focusing on Thomson’s geese, which in the original works are virtuosic dabs of oil that probably took no more than two fl icks of the painter’s wrist to create, Reeves meticulously records the texture of each dab with graphite lines.
As with Bruegel, the result augments Thomson’s technique into something that verges on the unrecognizable. First, Reeves highlights the opposition of painting and drawing by deliberately copying the textural surface of oil in the linear medium of graphite. He also lends a painstaking, almost obsessive timebased element to the reproduction of the work of a painter known for his confident speed. Finally, he summons the whole question of authenticity and the dynamic individual stamp—of which the brush stroke is the single most potent artifact.
Reeves’s most recent work, as seen last year in the exhibition “Smoke, Flowers, Cars” at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, strikes a fine balance between the exploration of representational paradigms and the desire to destabilize them. The works hover somewhere between a vigorous realism and a fl irtation with abstraction, with the desire to represent tempered by a dynamic awareness that it is indeed a medium that we are looking at.
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