Photo credit: Myrica Von Haselberg
Richard Galling’s “Remember Your Headspace” exhibition at the Green Gallery
Of the 10 paintings in Richard Galling’s fourth exhibition with the Green Gallery, “Remember Your Headspace” (through Feb. 16), six are on clear vinyl wrapped around traditional stretcher bars and four are on stretched canvas. A casual inspection won’t reveal dramatic differences between them. They are superficially of a feather. But, with more purposeful observation, distinctions arise, and formal and conceptual dialogues are activated that begin on the walls and leak out into the 3-D space of the galleries where five sculptures complicate things even further.
A painting is many things: It’s a historical convention, an expressive gesture, a communicative tool, a picture window, a Rorschach test for the viewer and, maybe most comprehensively as Galling acknowledges by his title, a manifestation of a particular headspace, the result of constant grappling with what it means to apply wet color on a fixed substrate in a moment of time. Looking at one of Galling’s paintings on canvas, say 18-006 (one of many frustratingly clinical titles,) we gather a rather palatable, even tasteful, composition of accumulated impressionistic alkyd and oil-painted noodlings in warm lavenders and mauves. Two thin olive-green loops painted on top of the bramble of marks function as a kind of forced compositional foreground into what is a fairly shallow and opaque painting. The loops leave the work with a self-referential awareness that keeps the painting in Galling’s headspace rather than giving it completely over to the viewer.
Nearby, on the painting 19-001, a similarly warm and muted purple thatch of painted marks recedes behind a chain link fence-like grid. Whether it is an object of this world or an abstract motif is unclear, which provides it with a powerful jolt of ambiguity. When the transparency of the clear vinyl eventually appears here and there, the space of the painting falls apart, and its consciousness opens up. What we began looking at, we end up looking through. Through the painting and through the subject of painting in general. Its formal qualities finally give way to considerations about the conventions and constructive anatomy of this and other paintings in the show.
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Sculptural contributions, such as the slightly anthropomorphic 18-001A, could also easily exist independently as seductive aesthetic curiosities, though they have more to offer. Each is built of pieces of hardwood and then fashioned and carved into eccentric objects, painted with dark and/or high-chroma colors, and either self-supported on the ground or suspended from the ceiling. Unlike the paintings, which feel additive, the sculptures are completed using a subtractive process where material is scooped away. They feel constructed, where the paintings feel deconstructed and keep the focus on volume, surface, form and material.
The show finally feels like an exercise in thinking about Galling’s thinking about art, which his title kind of warned us about. Three of the paintings have graphic dots applied to their lower half, which breaks their fourth walls pretty handily. It takes one out of his paintings, but into his headspace. It’s as if he wanted to see how the incongruous motif would affect the paintings while the cameras were live. A self-satisfying gesture, perhaps, but one that can be admired by someone not searching simply for gratification.
Last year, I recommended the podcast “Shit-Town,” the wrenching Southern Gothic tale of the now legendary John McLemore, to a mother I had met with my daughter on a playdate. She said she was looking for something “inspiring” to listen to. I told her it was “Astounding!” She came back the following week and scolded me: “What the hell was that?! I had to read another book right afterward to rinse out the nastiness.” My bad; you live, you learn. I learned that some people derive great pleasure from witnessing the process of another human’s search for meaning, even if that process is difficult. And others prefer lilywhite refined pleasure. I won’t recommend “Remember Your Headspace” to her, but I will to anyone who wants to see an artist stabbing his way through what it means to push his practice and make fresh art at the end of history.
