Richard Aldrich #2

View of Aldrich's former studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (bron: Art in America)

"Richard Aldrich's first studio in New York was a basement space with low ceilings (tough for a tall artist), small paintings precariously piled everywhere, and a floor strewn with so many objects and books and papers that you were unsure where to safely step without causing a landslide. How the artist keeps track of where things are is a total mystery. It was hard to believe that the pristine, eccentric gems hè was painting had sprung from the chaos of this little crypt. But you never can teil. Sometimes the most perfect art comes from a totally disor-dered environment. The studio of an artist is a representation of the person who works there, not necessarily a mirror image of the paintings produced there. These days Aldrich is aboveground in a larger, proper studio, but signs of mischief are still underfoot. In the big, open room hè has casually designated work areas. There are a few modest paintings in progress under a window near the corner. This is where hè will sit, resting against the wall, painting with the board balanced on his lap. In the middle of the floor, any number of objects are being moved around from one support to another, as Aldrich plays a game, combining and recombining things before deciding where they should be placed, working on many pieces at once. A sliver of mirror or a fragment of corduroy that's on the floor now might end up affixed to one of the large canvases. A section of canvas might be cut out and glued to another. He says there is a migration of parts from work to work around the room. Two paintings are almost out of view, under a table. He identifies one as having been returned from a show in bad shape. Rather than repair it, hè decided to continue to work on it. The other has water damage, but hè liked the way it's stained and kept it as a finished painting. Whether accepting a fortuitous accident or making a deliberate choice, Aldrich keeps coming back to the importance of process and to the amorphous way in which hè proceeds. "A big part of the process," hè says, "is losing things and then finding them."1 Here, then, is the studio as the "lost and found"
...." (bron: Bortolami Gallery)