Reg Yuson features ten, medium-sized, square panels lacquered with layers of high-grade automotive paint that creates highly reflective surfaces, predominantly rendered in black then offset by a few red pieces. These minimalist constructs are hybrid fusions of painting and sculpture where the works themselves are wall-bound, two-dimensional surfaces, and its execution requires the rigorous process that sculpture entails. Entitled Seeing Yourself Seeing Yourself, the exhibition title hints at the reflexive nature of art and the artist’s sometimes-accidental-but-inevitable inquiry into one’s own nature.

The square format and black-on-black with horizontal-and-vertical-stripe motif incidentally recalls Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings as such minimalist works would tend to draw the affinity, but perhaps more than the philosophical ruminations of Reinhardt is the artist’s lifelong fascination for the automobile. Executed with the precision and proficiency of a production assembly-line process, the artist perhaps sublimates his fetish and feel for design. His work betrays an affinity for the futurist movement in the early part of the last century, as the artist seeks to exemplify the virtues of modern machines; this series is akin to an ode to, or a glorification of, these high-performance engines.

His canvases possess an aerodynamic, stealth-like blackness achieved through the utilization of the blackest black paint available. Its reflective surface is ruptured by matte layers of paint to break the overall reflective sheen. The reflection defines the surrounding space and the viewer catches a glimpse of himself, the immediate environment around him, and whatever lies in between.

The matte surface bisects the painting like strips of reality that pull the viewer’s attention to the actual, as opposed to the reflected surface. The objective or subjective reality, the object itself or the reflection on its skin recall the timeless issues surrounding painting itself and the perpetual tug between figuration and abstraction.

Reg Yuson’s works have a decidedly classical look and a built-in old school charm concerned with fine attention to detail, the formal elements of geometry, and the illusionistic utilization of space and surface. His creative impulses seem derived from some purpose or function other than satisfying the viewer’s whim. They resist the usual romanticist preconditions of painting, possessing instead an industrial finish—Yuson’s wall-bound pieces, with their sprayed-on application of paint, retain a mirror-like gloss. His surface handling opts for mechanical precision and eschews that precious but often overvalued human touch. The works retain the invisible imprint of the hand—no signature, eccentric brushwork or calligraphy, or any residual imprint of individual genius. Subsumed by the space, they become literal and figurative mirrors. Again in this respect, they recall Reinhardt’s presence; though in this instance, it evokes his classic cartoon where the viewer dismisses an abstract artwork asking what it represents, and where the artwork laughs back at him and asks him instead what he represents.

The pieces are contemplative pieces that explore the act of looking at an artwork and looking at yourself and what art represents. As reflecting skins of paint, they are elegant in themselves. Streamlined, emblematic canvases with sleek, obsidian elegance, they are ultimately a reminder that what you see when looking through an artwork’s infinite layers is yourself.

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