Richard Raiselis : Tall Things Considered

March 3 – April 1 at Gallery NAGA

In March, Gallery NAGA presents a large exhibition of new work by a mid-career painter who has used lofty perches above Boston’s financial district and Kenmore Square areas to develop elaborately observed treatments of structures and space. 

Richard Raiselis: Tall Things Considered is on exhibition from March 3 through April 1.  A reception for the artist and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, March 3 from 6 to 8 pm.  In addition, Raiselis speaks about his work on Saturday, March 11 at 2 pm.

Raiselis’s work is interesting in many ways.  As painting, it deploys constellations of orchestrated rhythms – geometries, color, and scale – to concoct sumptuous images.  As observation of urban texture, it depicts the curious relationships among structures and city dwellers.  But its most fundamental interest, at least for the painter himself, may be its examination of the act of perception itself.

“Bonnard said that observation is a creative act,” Raiselis says.  “My entire painting life has been a study in perception.  Working from observation, seeing, is a way we give ourselves our measure, a way that we establish our relationship with the world.

“In physics, there’s the idea that, when you measure, the act of measuring changes the information.  I don’t think anyone knows how the world really looks.  I would say there is no accuracy.

“How I choose to measure generates the look of the image,” Raiselis continues.  “In the painting Congress Street, I made a decision to establish the cross hairs of my sight at the horizon in the center of the painting.  Everything is measured from this point.  The result is both convincing and distorted.  A building that’s curving begins to suggest new things, or has another meaning.  What we think is familiar is suddenly not familiar.  What I do is part reporting and part metaphor.

“The act of looking is colored by so many other images.  The photographs in the Sunday Globe and the Sunday Times become the models for how we will see.  My activity of looking is informed by those Sunday magazines, too, and I’m doing a lot to try to forget them.  Here’s one guy’s vision to give you something to chew on.”

Work for this exhibition was supported in part by an individual artist grant from the Artist’s Resource Trust of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation.