Tyson Reeder’s recent paintings consider garments adorning the figure as framework to house color, mark and pattern. An exploration into fashion allows the artist to focus these formal concerns. The paintings are flat containing thin washes of fluorescent and pastel pigments suggesting qualities of a sticker, be it physical or digital. Reeder’s new works are always vertically oriented and scaled close to the dimensions of large format fashion magazines or posters. The figure, isolated by a minimal background, takes on the quality of an icon. Although we are often drawn to predetermined conclusions about the role of the body in painting (and image); Reeder posits the figure as an arbitrary, neutral vessel. The directness of the titles helps to illustrate this further, pointing directly to the garments at hand versus a peripheral narrative. These gestures suggest a way to use painting and the body to conceive of fashion through its plural and populus nature.
This is not the artist’s first foray into fashion. As a member of George de George, a collective of New York-based artists, Reeder performed and designed garments for a Dadaist runway show at Serpentine Gallery in London. Later he collaborated with Celine for their SS21 line famously worn by Rihanna and Gucci Mane. In these new works, the artist acts as designer, envisioning his version of fashion. In contrast to painting, fashion easily allows a variety of access points. Choosing and arranging garments is generally a part of one’s daily routine. These objects become a way to mark how one may socially identify and become a pillar of self expression or the denial of such. Fashion acts as a space of projection; through advertisements, costumes on screen, even dressing an avatar for gaming platforms. Like painting, fashion is endlessly referencing and quoting; we can just pick up the signals more quickly. Reeder toys with this myriad of possibilities in his ventures. He allows visual cues to deflate, reform, even eat each other throughout his depictions. The paintings become about the potential of form and the ability of the figure to uphold such.
In fashion there is a constantly morphing consensus. Being present in a world expedited by TikTok styles, always-already emerging subcultures and their trends; Reeder visually wonders what is good and bad. Representations of high and low in fashion are so interchangeable the terms may no longer function. The challenge is in the race to edge the next seemingly radical move. But painting is sooo slow comparatively, perhaps these works offer a brief pause to the visual overflow we may choose to partake in. These paintings suggest something provisional and emergent; a becoming, before it is off to the next. Speed can be great, but Reeder reminds us it is important to look and to imagine. Fashion allows for some of the most innovative ways to use the body; the artist’s inventive command steers us into a place where we can visually flirt with the aesthetics of this accelerated culture.