Lillian Davies on Judit Reigl

I requested a younger painter to affix me on my first go to to this survey of 5 many years of Judit Reigl’s work. Although my good friend’s artwork jumps between figuration and blankets of monochrome colour, she was shocked that the massive gestural canvases hung within the street-facing area of Kamel Mennour’s latest gallery had been made by the identical artist because the collection of small abstractions that lined an extended hallway and the massive, cleanly figurative compositions offered in two white rooms on the very finish. This sense of shock is widespread in encounters with Reigl’s work.

In telling the story of her escape from her native Hungary in 1950, occupied for the reason that finish of World Conflict II by Stalin’s Communist forces, Reigl would emphasize that she succeeded solely on her ninth try. This willpower is echoed in her actions as a painter. She labored in collection, not due to some Conceptual curiosity in repetition, however out of a lived apply of psychological persistence and bodily endurance. And narrative enters even into her most summary compositions. Right here, for instance, on an almost sq. 1961 canvas from the collection “Écriture en masse” (Mass Writing), 1959–65, fiery-orange and black oil has been labored with a palette knife, apparently at nice velocity. Made simply 5 years after the violently quashed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, these work proceed to wrestle with the rebellion and bloody repression of Reigl’s technology.

In Paris, Reigl had made her strategy to La Ruche, “the Beehive,” a dynamic group of artists’ studios on the Left Financial institution. Fellow Hungarian Simon Hantaï launched her to André Breton’s Surrealists. By means of her personal computerized intuitive course of, colour and sweetness would emerge. Likewise, the male determine would discover type in Reigl’s canvases, beginning along with her “Homme” (Man) collection, 1966–72, represented right here by canvases composed in black oil paint on a white background from 1964 and 1966. In a single, a person’s midsection, as if seen by his personal eyes from above, morphs into an anguished face. Constantly nude, Reigl’s male types, which might quickly disappear from her work solely to return on the finish of her profession, are sometimes alone—much less sexual creatures than terribly susceptible human beings.

This exhibition’s title, “Je suis la Règle,” performs on the resemblance of the artist’s title to the French phrase for rule, or ruler, which stems from the Latin regere. The road comes from a poem Reigl wrote in 1985, when she was in her early sixties. “My physique performs the sport,” she begins, “Dominated by ‘I’”—in French, Je suis la règle. It’s a manifesto not solely of independence, but in addition of self-discipline. By no means an anarchist, she was the impartial ruler of her personal creative area, the inventor of her personal language. “Fragment de déroulement” (Items of Unfolding), 1974–2010—a collection she returned to a number of occasions earlier than her loss of life in 2020, represented right here with small canvases from 1974, 2009, and 2010—reveals this in written type by a course of she developed as “paint-writing.” Utilizing a sponge dipped in pigment to create horizontally operating passages of calligraphic strokes (typically on the again of the canvas earlier than washing the entrance in a single pigment), Reigl introduced a musicality to the rhythm of her marks, although linguistically they had been nonsense.

Inky black is distinguished within the artist’s works, even when lots of her male figures drift in washes of blue and inexperienced. Two works right here from the collection “Face à . . .” (Face to . . .), 1988–90—individually dated 1988 and 1989—confirmed Reigl’s male types, as alike as two canoes, adrift on washes of deep sea inexperienced. The sketchy contours of her human types are practically as feathery as a forest of kelp. A 1991 work from Reigl’s later “Corps au pluriel” (Physique in Plural) collection, 1990–92, moved a extra crisply outlined male silhouette to a celestial stage, putting a physique whose colour is the inexperienced of spring leaves on a background of blue sky, pale clouds, and a white rectangle. This geometric type frames Reigl’s practically life-size male determine and echoes the form of her canvas. It might be a doorway, a stone tomb, or an image of an eighth or a ninth try at escape. For Reigl, portray additionally appeared to have turn into a strategy to take flight.

— Lillian Davies