Jack Reilly
Jack Reilly is a longstanding contemporary American artist known for his paintings on shaped canvas structures, seductive illusionism, and signature brushwork. His work is widely collected and exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the world. With over 50 solo exhibitions and countless group shows, Reilly is recognized as an original artist of the 1970s Abstract Illusionism movement and one of the foremost painters working in shaped canvas today. He maintains studios in California and Florida.
Statement: The circle holds strong significance as a fundamental geometric shape and has played a crucial role in astronomy, mathematics, and physics. It has been known since before recorded history. Circles are common throughout the cosmos and within our natural world. It is the basis for the wheel and numerous other scientific devices used in machinery and modern inventions. As a simple object, it symbolizes the concept of cosmic unity and the cyclical nature of existence. In religious traditions it signifies many sacred and spiritual concepts, including unity, infinity, wholeness, the universe, divinity, balance, stability and perfection, among numerous other ideas. Structures like Stonehenge, medieval calendars or even analog wristwatches illustrate our preoccupation with the circle as a representation of time and mysteries of the universe. The circle has puzzled humans, from primitive stargazers to the most educated of scientists of our time.
My interest lies in the investigation, expressed through abstract painting, of elements regarding the circle and its connection to lingering concepts, both tangible and intangible. I choose to begin on a circular shaped-canvas structure as a formal device, which creates a visual container that refers to the nature of the circle as a metaphor of the elements it represents. A series of concentric circles surround the outlying areas of the canvas. These rings consist of hundreds, if not thousands of rapidly applied, highly chromatic brushstrokes, which are tightly compressed within hard-edge boundaries. The visual effect of my punctuated brushwork has often been compared to Gothic stained glass and Byzantine mosaics. Within the center of the canvas lie wide-open spaces, alluring portals consisting of soft fields of color (that appear to be) floating somewhere behind the polychromed exterior rings of the canvas perimeters. While viewing these color fields, one can get lost in ambient sensations and visual ambiguity of light, color, and space.
Contemplating the symbolic and formal references of these circular paintings, or simply meditating upon the object itself, and its intrinsic beauty, is of course the prerogative of the viewer. One can approach them simply as colors and textures on a circular object, or metaphors of the physical and metaphysical state in which we exist.
