56 Henry is pleased to present new work by Kevin Reinhardt at The Salon Paris from Thursday October 17th through Sunday October 20th.

A clown balances on a line, stepping towards and away from its endpoints. It looks equally like a tightrope and a drawing of a tightrope. Solidly black, like the compression of all colors, or the absence of light as when window blinds are drawn. He teeters back and forth, between surface and depth, stepping from two dimensions towards three then back again.

A mirror frame emerges from a wall as it recedes into it. Cast in drywall and painted eggshell white, it is not hung on the wall but part of it, flush with it. Opaque décor and faux furniture dissolve into floors and walls like this. There are no subjects, only gradations between foreground and background. The clown literalizes gradient, derived from the Latin gradus (18c.), meaning “a step.”

Below him, a pair of paintings imagine window blinds from this house. Red blinds lay atop rainbow ones such that red melts into rainbow, rainbow into red. Gradations in structural components of space are recast as gradations in color across surface. Two paintings imagine the house in two dimensions, where everything looks like a line, and form looks something like color.

Below the paintings, sculptures disguise themselves as chairs. Leaning against a wall, they are fixed in feigned flatness, unable to unfold. In a technical drawing, lines point towards a future. But these are not crafted from technical drawings; they are crafted to resemble them. Not objects of desire but desiring objects. The three chairs mimic flat drawings in three dimensions. Caught between plans for use and objects to be used, they become a site of anticipation.

Reinhardt’s carefully constructed scene is stuck somewhere between two dimensions and three, becoming both yet fully neither. Each line compresses a world, containing something other than itself, beyond itself. Lines cease to be geometric and begin to be visual and conceptual thresholds—gradients absent physical dimensions or endpoints. Here is a horizon of expectation, where chairs remain folded, blinds remain drawn, and the future never arrives.

Rue de Paradis
75010 Paris, France

Thursday, October 17, 10am–8pm
Friday, October 18, 11am–8pm
Saturday, October 19, 11am–8pm
Sunday, October 20, 11am–6pm

thesalon.paris