Love Thy Neighbor
James Reyes
June 3, 2023 - July 2, 2023
Ki Smith Gallery is thrilled to present Love Thy Neighbor by James Reyes. The works in this exhibition are complex amalgams of memory, imagination and fantasy depicted through rich oil paintings that move between loose gestural abstraction and highly rendered stylized figuration. Reyes’s process is reactive and intuitive using broad action packed gestures as a cryptic map to pull out subject matter, conger memory, and allow the abstraction of the under painting to act as a portal in to the subconscious. The push and pull between the layers of the work mirrors memory and imagination, where some moments are crystal clear while others fade into swirls of abstraction. Reyes’s works depict a range of subjects and archetypes often intermingling figures with animals that suggest hidden desire, emotions and the unconscious.
Available Works
James Reyes (b. 1990) is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. Born to Puerto Rican and Colombian parents and raised in the Bronx, Reyes’s works are directly inspired by his cultural and social environment. His intensely gestural, occasionally chaotic brushstrokes, splashes, drips, sprays, and scrapes conjure figures both fully rendered and surreal, creating a mesmerizing push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction. Reyes received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and has since exhibited at numerous galleries, museums and fairs across the U.S.