Intersection of Color: Loge

Painted in 2019, Reggie Burrows Hodges’s Loge is a triumph of contemporary figurative painting, building—as it does—on art historical traditions, yet reinvigorating them for a modern audience. Like a scene presented by the Impressionist painter Édouard Manet or his contemporaries, this canvas shows a fashionable crowd bathed in luxurious light, augmented with vibrant pops of color. The members of the crowd are united by their uniform white outfits, but they maintain their own distinguishing characteristics as individual details begin to emerge, like an intricate lace top worn by one of the figures, and a small, but eye-catching powder-blue pocket square sported by another. While each of the figures is anonymous, Hodges’s precise application of paint gives each form a personality. One of the artist’s most important early canvases, it was exhibited in his solo show Intersection of Color (2020) at the Press Hotel in Maine.

A hallmark of Hodges’s practice is his method of beginning with a dark backdrop and building up the composition from here. He explains, “I start with a black ground [as a way] of dealing with blackness’s totality. I’m painting an environment in which the figures emerge from the negative space…if you see my paintings in person, you’ll look at depth” (R. Hodges, quoted in H. Als, “Nature Abhors a Vacuum,” Reggie Burrows Hodges, New York, 2021). This technique carries special significance in the context of a loge, which is the private box in a theater made famous by Mary Cassatt’s Impressionist masterpiece In the Loge (1878). A vantage point from which to look and be looked at, the loge is a separate, private space, one marked by class, race, and access. Hodges’s figures therefore move between public and private spheres; they are simultaneously enclosed and free. Moreover, Hodges specifically cites the foundational modernist painter Milton Avery as an influence. Relevant to Loge is Avery’s lovely White Umbrellas (1952), which also uses a humble white to great effect.

The artist’s first solo museum exhibition Turning a Big Ship recently opened at the Addison Gallery of American Art outside of Boston. This past summer, he also mounted a critically lauded exhibition at Karma, Los Angeles, of which Artforum wrote, “The conjoining of facelessness and the gaze brings Hodges deep into conversation with the history of painting, with an allegorical approach (and a deftness of facture) that echoes that of Milton Avery, Jacob Lawrence, Bob Thompson, and Édouard Vuillard, among others” (A. Gyorody, “Critics’ Picks: Reggie Burrows Hodges,” Artforum, July 2023). His paintings are also held in numerous prestigious public collections around the world, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Celebrated essayist Hilton Als asks, “Hodges’s characters—all of whom I think of as characters in a giant narrative about American life as it’s played out in games and loneliness—often don’t have physiognomies with discernible features. Their faces are a black plane. Does this make them ghosts? Are we ghosts now, as we wait for change in this ill world of the dying, framed by loneliness?” (H. Als, “‘In the Service of Others’: The Art of Reggie Burrows Hodges,” The New York Review, March 22, 2021). In Loge, we find community within loneliness as these figures are united by theater (the subject of Hodges’s undergraduate degree at the University of Kansas). From black, Hodges builds a world that speaks as much to connectivity as estrangement. In the spirit of the Color Field painters, he mobilizes paint to create not only form and line, but also emotion.