Henry Riekena
Contemporary San Francisco painter Henry Riekena fuses the energy of graffiti and graphic art with the deep, meditative mindset of abstract expressionism, resulting in mesmerizing canvases that one can wander around in for hours. “The first thing you need to understand about my work,” he says, “is that I'm not painting a 'thing,' I'm creating an effect. You spend some time, let your eyes start to flow around the piece, your focus shifts back and forth between all of the different compositions, and once you get a little bit lost and your brain clears out—that's when the magic happens.”
Looking at Riekena's work, the viewer first notices the energetic quality of his line and composition, and the balance and subtle control of color learned over a lifetime spent obsessed with visual art. But taking his cue and spending a little more time with the work, another dimension opens up, as the visual space becomes plastic and hypnotic, and the viewer begins to feel almost intoxicated. “There is a very intentional mental element to it, I am very consciously trying to take your brain into a certain state. I see a lot of my peers obsessed with irony, surface, and the minutely specific and personal, but I'm maybe old-fashioned—I'm trying to be earnest, go deep and universal, to get people on kind of a zen level and share something that's really hard to describe.”
This idea is most completely expressed in his recent monumental work A Nice Way to Travel 3 Hours Into the Present, a “Walk-in painting” consisting of a single 7' x 60' canvas that wraps around the entire inside of an 18' diameter circular yurt. Nearly a year in the making, the installation cuts the viewer off from the outside world, enveloping them in an environment of endless pathways that swirl through the work, shift, and re-emerge, creating a space that is as incomprehensible as it is beautiful.
Riekena still considers himself an emerging artist, but has shown his work throughout the Bay Area, as well as showings nationally and as far away as the Chianciano Museum in Italy. The 32-year-old cites many varied influences in his work, including the graffiti art prevalent in his adopted hometown, the meditative abstract expressionist works of Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, the playful juxtaposition of line and color in the work of Paul Klee, and contemporary masters such as Mark Bradford. "I don't think of abstract expressionism as a mid-century movement. That's maybe when a lot of the parameters of it were laid out, but there is still a lot on the table there, a lot of opportunity to take the goals and mindset of those seminal abstract painters and continue to push them forward with new ideas, new tools, and create really powerful contemporary artwork. And I'm not the only one who is proving it."
