Perry Rubenstein Gallery is pleased to present Downburst, Daniel Rich’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring paintings made over the past year. Rich turns selected images circulating on the Internet, in newspapers and magazines into unique paintings, highlighting the events they depict and the process of their documentation.

The body of work made for Downburst centers on the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the ongoing turmoil in the region of the Middle East. The title of the exhibition refers to a meteorological phenomenon where, unlike in a tornado, strong winds are directed outwards from the point where the downburst hits land or water. Drawing a metaphoric parallel between Rich’s practice and this phenomenon, the title denotes that his works are part of a process of uncontrolled, widespread reception of a single event, the effects and visibility of which reach far beyond its origin.

Rich’s hyper-realistic paintings often depict buildings and sites that have been destroyed or altered since the source image was taken. Saddam (2007), for instance, shows a monument to Saddam Hussein that was demolished right after the end of his dictatorship. Rich lifted this image from the Internet after reading an article that described the order for U.S. soldiers to destroy the dictator’s image whenever they encountered it in public spaces. Every painting in the exhibition highlights a different aspect of the complex intertwinement of economic and political interests that underlie the source images. Rich’s recent painting, Obama’s Visit to Baghdad (July 2008) (2008), in part points out the political act of U.S politicians visiting war zones and taking helicopter tours. The World (Dubai) (2008), on the other hand, comments on the architectural, seemingly experimental dreamland that Dubai and the United Arab Emirates represent, and attempts to draw attention to the parallel existence of a whole different reality that is not too far away.

The self-imposed task to paint in Rich’s particular way is similar to an act of reconstruction, of rebuilding a given image. Once he has selected an image, Rich makes an enlarged print, scaled to the size of the board. Following a rigid process that he has set up and follows for all of his works, he then determines the colors of different areas, and draughts the outline of the painting. Subsequently masking area after area, he methodically adds colors.

Rich usually removes any human presence from the source images and transforms nature and buildings into almost schematic representations. Denying himself any further pictorial intervention or personal comment, he does not make an overt political statement with his works. Instead, he strives to take on a neutral position, setting his conceptual and practical focus on selection and the process of transferring the image from one medium into another. The images Rich chooses to paint are both personal and subjective choices. They mirror his own history of seeing and perceiving events happening in other parts of the world and their mediation through images in the news and popular culture.

Rich provides no answers, just questions. It remains open if whether by highlighting easily accessible mass media images in meticulous unique paintings he reclaims or questions painting as a privileged category of images. However answered, Rich’s work acts both as a discourse on mass-produced pictorial sources of information and as a quasi-monument to the events depicted in the source material.