Until Then

Maximillian William is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Reginald Sylvester II, his fourth solo show with the gallery. In a new series of paintings, Sylvester continues to explore the associations and implications of the readymade, as well as the history and limits of abstraction.

Sylvester builds his paintings from a particular set of materials and processes, infusing the works with a range of ideas. The artist starts by stretching rubber, a material associated with Africa and colonisation, over an aluminium substrate. Atop the rubber surface, Sylvester creates a form of assemblage out of discarded military shelters known as ‘drab shelter halves’ or ‘military pup tents’. These shelters were designed as a form of refuge for soldiers amid harsh conditions, or for the more mundane task of housing military equipment. Sylvester sources the material specifically from the 1960s and early 70s, a period of tumultuous political and social change in the US, not to mention the the end of abstraction and modernism as the dominant form in American art. Finally, Sylvester layers this rough, articulated surface with a dynamic abstraction, replete with saturated colour and dynamic brushwork.

Freighted with a history of combat, disguise and temporary shelter, yet alive with an expressive bloom of paint, the paintings address our age of uncertainty, becoming forms of both self-protection and self-presentation. Moreover, artists such as Alberto Burri and Robert Rauschenberg have influenced how Sylvester approaches medium and assemblage. By using readymades reclaimed from the military, from an era when Abstract Expressionism had run its course, he addresses with a unique artistic language the politics and legacy of abstraction in America and beyond.