Richard Knight’s ‘Subtle Moments of Organized Magic'

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Photo: Portrait Society Gallery of Contemporary Art

Richard Knight, Scrim

Richard Knight, Scrim, 2022. Found objects.

There’s a lot going on in Richard Knight’s current exhibition, “Walking with Purpose,” at Portrait Society, up through July 30. Formally, materially, and conceptually. We see everything from traditional pen and ink drawings, mobiles, wall sculptures, paintings, and even houseplants. But amidst all his wooly and reaching enthusiasms, subtle moments of organized magic coalesce. 

Viewers searching for contained, discrete objects of delectation will have to take what they can get from among the teeming array of divergent artistic expressions. Those looking for the traces of a voracious accumulator, appropriator, arranger, and manipulator will get a jolt immediate of satisfaction. All will be satisfied in the end, though, because there’s enough of everything to go around, and when all that everything begins to cross-germinate, it’s fantastic fruit for anyone searching for mental vibrations born of the material world.

Two monochrome paintings, one sport-drink purple, the other oxidized-avocado green on the near wall maintain a buffalo stance in relation to an adjacent mobile of dozens of strands of castaway objects, or more like debris, suspended on nylon lines. The maximally minimal presence of the hanging sculpture suggests we look closer at the deceptively reserved paintings nearby. We’re in the middle of a visual conversation it turns out, which snaps us into focus. The surfaces and ever-so-slightly-irregular shapes of those canvases start to swell as we reconsider them. Their skewedness and loud, but in-between colors encourage an investigation into the possibilities of quietness, imperfection, and objecthood. All of it a subtle and dignified reaction to the chattery mobile and its indirect drawing of bouncing cast shadows on the opposite wall.

Kinetic Energy

In the adjacent gallery, Knight’s large-scale wall sculpture echoes the kinetic energy of the mobile in front gallery. “Flower Box,” despite its high relief, hovers against the wall and emphasizes a linearity that connects it to Knight’s interest in drawing. Across the gallery, a 6-foot x 6-foot work on loose canvas features an assortment of found objects over a scramble of consonant linear marks. The relationship of the forms in the work helps unite his drawing and sculptural interests in the space of a single work. Which is helpful, given the especially divergent work in the back space–sculptural objects, shelving, paintings, chairs, plants–that takes the show into an entirely more domestic context.

Meanwhile, on a table in the same room, a collection of densely noodled ink-on-paper drawings offer a more informal trip through Knight’s foundational appreciation for line, form, and improvisational art making. I’m glad I had the chance to sit and peel through them one-by-one, as they add an illuminating dimension to the rest of the show. Each quirky, inked composition, the shapes, arrangements, and marks vined out in my mind slowly snaking and ensnaring all the work in the show; all the objects, debris, paint, canvas, wood and chlorophyl finally arranged themselves into a distinct disorderly view of variegated reality at the margins of both the material and the imagined.

Everyone’s looking for magic. Some look for it in church, some in culture, others in nature. And every artist for their own part is trying to create that magic. Some do it through objects, others through ideas, and still others through the act of searching itself. And sometimes the searching leaves breadcrumbs for the viewer to locate their own reveries and revelations. Richard Knight’s show lays down lots of little trails to follow.