David Reed’s Sense and Sensuality

Any list of adjectives used to describe the paintings of David Reed is bound to include one (and probably several) of the following terms: voluptuous, sensual, luscious, radiant, luxuriant, languorous, seductive.

Reed, in short, makes very sexy paintings. That they’re abstract paintings rather than figurative ones makes their sexiness all the more remarkable.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, an engaging, well-selected survey of Reed’s work since the mid-1970s is in part designed to answer the peculiar question of just what makes these abstract canvases so inescapably sexy. Curator Elizabeth Armstrong has brought together 40 canvases--more than half made in the last 10 years--and five recent installations in a satisfying effort to show Reed’s trajectory. That two of the installations incorporate actual beds (one with rumpled sheets and a bathrobe)--not to mention scenes of the obsessive passion between Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller “Vertigo”--only seems fitting.

“Judy’s Bedroom” (1992) and “Scottie’s Bedroom” (1994) include exact replicas of the beds in Judy’s San Francisco hotel room and in Scottie’s apartment in “Vertigo.” Hanging over each headboard is a horizontal painting by Reed, with waves and sinuous curlicues of color slithering about inside their rectangular containers, while a television monitor at the foot of the bed plays the clip in which the bedroom appears. Using digital technology, Reed has inserted his paintings into Hitchcock’s movie, where they hang as mute witnesses to the intensely erotic action.

Reed’s choice of subject is inspired. Perhaps no work of popular art has been more relentlessly scrutinized by legions of footnote-happy, post-structuralist academics than Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” Yet, who could imagine anything more divergent from the erotic power that makes “Vertigo” worth watching in the first place than footnote-happy, academic post-structural analysis?

Reed reclaims for art its source in erotic pleasure. The urge to climb into his cloned bed and watch the movie, curling up midway between the painted image and the electronic one, is strong.

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Equally important is the way the setup becomes a small dissertation on Reed’s art--and on his aspiration to become what he calls “a bedroom painter.” Reed wants to make paintings that generate a direct experience of one-on-one intimacy with a viewer. Time and again, he achieves it.

Movies and TV are part of his arsenal in accomplishing this aim, and rightly so. We may like to think that our sensate response to the world is composed of the raw, unfiltered data of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell, but it isn’t. In an image-soaked culture, our heads are filled from an early age with flickering pictures and pictorial fragments that shade our sensual experience. In the process of making paintings, Reed plunders this image bank.

Process is signaled as a central concern in the show’s earliest works, which date from 1974. Narrow vertical canvases slathered with off-white paint are the ground for wide, horizontal strokes of red or black oil paint, brushed across in a repetitive, almost mechanical manner from top to bottom.

Applied wet-on-wet, the colored brush strokes run and dribble into the white ground. Reed’s orientation--shared by a variety of other post-Minimal process artists of the time, including Lynda Benglis, Richard Serra and Barry Le Va--was distinct in one significant way: He applied process inquiries directly to the Modern tradition of abstract painting, then widely regarded as irredeemably exhausted.

These early brush-stroke paintings are not satisfying in themselves; but, in hindsight, they’re interesting for the information they contain on the ideas Reed was working through. It’s also easy to see in them a connection to the big, brash, mechanistically elegant Pop brush-stroke paintings of Roy Lichtenstein, which date from the 1960s.

Pop art’s critique of the academic, institutionalized art of the museum would prove to be pivotal in the development of Reed’s dream of being a bedroom painter. That it would take him about a decade to find sure footing on this path is both unsurprising and a measure of Reed’s commitment to the project.

The show speeds forward into the 1980s. Reed’s paintings still emphasize a narrow, rectangular orientation--either vertical or horizontal--but now the aim seems to be to require of the viewer a sensuous visual scan across a long, voluptuously painted field. The scan recalls tracking shots in movies, as well as the way visual data is transmitted across a television screen. Sense memory that is distinctly modern and technological is brought into pictorial play.

Scanning is also a poetic term, describing the way rhythm and meter are analyzed. Reed’s paintings since the 1980s have been composed from great rhythmic patterns of tightly curled strokes of color. Often the canvas is subdivided into smaller rectangles, where the color, pattern and texture of the strokes abruptly changes. The format hovers somewhere between a CinemaScope movie and a Windows program on a personal computer.

The format also recalls the typical composition of 16th century Italian Mannerist paintings. Radical jumps in visual narrative, sudden shifts in chromatic temperature and vertiginous leaps in scale (vertigo!) create a dreamy, even delirious sense of worlds within worlds. Reed’s color, like Pontormo’s or late Michelangelo’s, is filled with an odd internal light, at once synthetic and glamorous.

Sometimes the marks of a brush are exposed. Thanks, though, to the use of alkyd, a slick synthetic resin mixed with pigment, the swirls and arabesques are mostly as sleek, smooth and translucent as glass.

Either way, you don’t have the sense of these strokes as being expressionistic--that is, as encoded marks outwardly representing the artist’s specific internalized experience. Instead, they’re lively, sensual and beckoning as paintings.

For the exhibition, Reed has also made two video works. One projects onto a recent painting a live video image of a glass-walled museum gallery overlooking the Pacific Coast; the layering of technology, nature and art that drives Reed’s work is made explicit.

The other, more resonant piece is called “Sunset Room for Vampires.” On the floor in front of a gallery window, a video monitor replays a continuous loop of a sunset, which was shot through the same window. As the video sky turns from blue to crimson, then to yellow, orange, green and finally jet black, the glass on the photographed window slowly becomes reflective.

The mirror might not be able to reflect the body of a vampire, that voluptuous creature of the night, but it does reflect a gorgeous, seductive painting filled with billowing sunset colors, which is hanging on the gallery wall behind you. David Reed’s paintings turn out to be sexy because, like Dracula, they’re dramatically undead.

* David Reed, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 700 Prospect St., (619) 454-3541, through Jan. 3. Closed Mondays.