Todd Reynolds

Todd Reynolds’ oils’ and watercolors’ most salient contemporary features depict an America in which chronic violence is implied, hope is in abeyance. His quasi-narrative, usually large scale paintings rip the niceties and pieties off of middle class life, portraying, instead, a near-Surreal world of low-life characters, drug-induced or -inspired people in scenarios of dead-end near apocalypse. His oevre is remarkably akin to the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates: tough, nasty, gritty, non-redemptive.

Both Reynolds and Oates depict the remnants of rural American life, a world of either predators or prey, wherein fantasy replaces imagination, pornography is pandemic, and where people have ceased to connect, where “winners” stomp over “losers”, yet both groups join the ranks of the disenfranchised and the decivilized. Reynolds must be considered Baroque in his dystopian paintings. Yet, like Oates, it would be easy, if incorrect, to consider his work Gothic in his depictions of the dregs of humanity. Both Oates and Reynolds come from an America decayed and dying, she from upstate New York, and he from Portsmouth Ohio, a city on the edge of Appalachia, with blocks of abandoned houses and businesses.

Oates’ fiction, once critically derided as Gothic and extreme, has lately been reevaluated as realistic; she is now considered one of America’s great Realist writers. Reynolds’ world of lost hope, nightmare, and grotesquerie must now be considered as realistically American as Grant Wood or Andrew Wyeth or Norman Rockwell. Oates’ and Reynolds’ cities and towns just happened to decompose earlier than many others in America. If what Reynolds paints—subject matter/content—is generally relentlessly bleak, his methodologies, iconographies, and appropriations of paintings, styles, in both oil and watercolor, remain firmly grounded in art history from the Baroque to modern and contemporary, and he revels in the act of painting as he absorbs ideas from Roman portraiture, Goya’s court portraiture, and the Spanish painters Velasquez and Zurburan. Since Manet’s portraits incorporate those same Spanish influences, Reynolds’ combination of figuration and blocks of abstraction come to him from Zurburan through Manet, as well. His extreme Baroque lighting is borrowed from Caravaggio and from the Venetian Renaissance painters.

An Expressionist, Reynolds’ paintings absorb stylistic conceits and painterly lushness from both Lucian Freud, and Francis Bacon, the sculptural attenuation of Medieval Church art and the architectonic, totemic presence of neo-primitivism and the overscaled frontalism of some outsider art. Combining such disparate influences is no mean feat, and Reynolds’ achievement is that much more impressive because his eclectic appropriation of such divergent and unusual influences manifests an enormous intelligence and sense of place in the history of art.

Reynolds’ Surrealist-like dreamscapes—more accurately nightmare-scapes—possess narrative intent, some biting social commentary, yet the influence of christian morality plays are not far from the surface of his paintings. His figurative paintings represent what the Catholic church, in particular, represses and negates, yet the lost hope implies a time when it wasn’t. His use of the diptych refers both to Western religious painting, as well as to the disjunctive 80’s painters such as David Salle and Julian Schnabel. His diptychs are transgressive and non-narrative at times. Reynolds’ imagination is extremely fertile; we are caught in the maelstrom of these nightmarish images, as if we’re floating on the River Styx between life and death where America’s obsessive materialism is rotting and sinking, devolving into the chaos of poverty, pornography, petulance, and pestilence. A drug-like stupor pervades the deadened features of most those portrayed, who often seem entombed in ambiguous space between above and underground. Like many critics and social commentators, Reynolds’ nightmarish visions probably originated as the longings of an idealistic Romantic.