Daniel Reich Gallery is very please to announce an exhibition of new paintings by fabulist painter Tyson Reeder opening June 2nd. This will be his first New York solo exhibition since 2006 and it has been well worth the wait. His new work marks a confident and triumphant return.

Reeder’s new paintings represent a breakthrough in his indecipherable mark making which connects with painting history, while being so singular that they are reminiscent of folk and outsider art. The work is expressive in that his unique treatments reflect the wandering nature of the brain. Also at play is a newfound freedom with the brush so that his brushstrokes seem completely unweighted by precalculation. This allows each work a lively movement within itself as though Reeder’s fantastical world might come into being. Humor is present, but also a haunting beauty in his choice of color and execution. One colorful portrait has the laughter of a cartoon but in a peaceful aqua, yellow, pink and white. Another, while pleasurable, is very mysterious as though its subject is masked and obscured by a surface of brief white paint strokes. From this stares an eye, gently rendered carefully enough to have the gravity and surrealism of a Chagall eye. Reeder imagines he is depicting an exotic place where the future mingles with the past.

While painting this body of work, the artist looked at Picabia paintings where heads overlap with figures in landscapes overlap creating a strange and definitely delimited psychological space. Also influential were the paintings of Jean Fautrier who creates “blurry dusty weird amorphous blobs centered on paper on canvas” as Reeder describes it. Reeder admired Paul Klee for his peculiar cartoony imagery rendered with serious surface. Reeder’s canvases also borrow outline and composition from the ropey continuous lines of Brice Marden. Reeder enjoys the hieroglyphic quality of Aztec and Egyptian art, a device he uses to great effect in a completely incomprehensible green painting. Despite the artist’s informed images, he is fascinating because his style is unqualfiable. One cannot find a stable referent. There is even a bit of Henri Michaux in the under surface of an extraordinary lone light blue tree. A golden sun illuminating musicians seem like an ancient round relic. In another excellent work there is a singular extraordinary recollection of light on water. What is extraordinary within these brightly colored surfaces assembled from odd markings is that they have a depth of feeling and variation of mood.

Reeder has shown widely at Jack Hanley Gallery, the Black Dragon Society, participated in two-person shows at Hiromi Yoshi in Japan, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise where he helped curate the much commented upon Drunk vs. Stoned exhibition. He has shown at The Suburban as well and participated in Group exhibitions at Cheim and Read, the Swiss Institute, Shane Campbell Gallery, and Museum 52. He has done so many projects, helped invent so many strange events, performances and online television shows that it would be completely impossible to enumerate here.