Reginald Madison: Lucid Dreamer

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Reginald Madison
Lucid Dreamer

October 25, 2024 - January 25, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, October 25, 6 - 8pm

Rachel Uffner Gallery is pleased to present Lucid Dreamer, Reginald Madison's first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Why don’t you make a mistake and do something right.

- Sun Ra

Reginald Madison’s (American, b. 1941) paintings and sculpture are exercises in trust; the artist tries to “disappear” in the process, entering a psychic space that he rarely recollects. Try asking him about specific decisions, and the answer is “the materials insisted.” Making art doesn’t seem like a choice for Madison, but a foundational need. What manifests in and on his heavily worked canvases, panels (often prepped with roofing tar), and found wood sculptures is the result of a singular style refined over decades of experimentation in technique, travel, and vast collecting practices. 

Madison has perfected a palette that embraces bold color (lime greens, salmon pinks, bright blues), toned down to an earthy—and always matte, he abhors sheen—hue. Texture is achieved through an assortment of mark-making materials, from rags to the palms of his hands to his collection of brushes. He mixes his colors directly on the walls of his studio. There are a number of abstract forms, some with biomorphic qualities, that consistently appear in Madison’s work. Various intricate patterns are developed, perhaps a nod to his collection of textiles. Suprematism as well as the free jazz improvisation of Sun Ra and his Arkestra and others have influenced Madison, as he imbues spontaneity into each of his mediums. 

As a teenager, Madison found a box of paint supplies in a garbage can under the 57th Street viaduct under Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, thus beginning his self-taught career. He later worked at the US Steel Southworks, taking on extra shifts to save up money to take his young family to Europe for a year, where he visited the museums of Paris, Munich, and Madrid. In 1968 he had his first public showing of his artwork, at Art & Soul in Chicago, where he won third place in a competition juried by artist Richard Hunt and curator Jan van der Marck, founding director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. This formative exhibition experience gave him the confidence to further pursue his artmaking, and he traveled east to New York City and then western Massachusetts, before finally being drawn to Hudson, where he currently lives and works.

Lucid Dreamer comprises both paintings and sculptures, spanning over twenty years. Ohmm (2024) is made of old chair parts from the Hudson-based LB Furniture Industries, which existed from 1982 until closing due to bankruptcy in 2008. Madison has used these salvaged materials for numerous sculptural works. Ohmm is reminiscent of The Joyful Noise (2015), in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art, which depicts a figure from Sun Ra’s Arkestra. Here, the fanned chair parts act almost as halos for a chorus of angels. Madison has honed a stenciling technique using found lace doilies and tablecloths to create patterns on the largest pieces of wood. It is unusual for him to use color of any kind in his sculpture, as he finds the “wood itself has integrity that gets lost with color.” He made an exception in this case for the resulting texture. 

Hot House (2005) and Hot House 2 (2006/2024) tell a fascinating story of Madison’s process, giving a sense of the meticulous detail which was involved in what may seem like breezy improvisation. The smaller work was made first, and, engrossed by the forms, Madison decided to increase the scale. A flood in his then-studio prevented him from finishing the larger painting, and he did not return to it until recently. He worked to merge the palettes of the two works, not an easy undertaking when the custom colors are separated by almost twenty years. Hot House 2 is a stunning exhibit of Madison’s patternmaking and interaction of biomorphic forms.  More symmetrical than the first, Hot House 2 also shows the artist’s use of unusual paint application techniques, including balled up rags. The title, as with many of the works, comes from jazz. In this case, a song by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. 

The studio is never quiet. Timeout (2024) is named for a Dave Brubeck Quartet record; the titles always come after the painting is finished. It’s hard not to see a bit of the influence of S. Neil Fujita (American, 1921-2010), the famed art director for Columbia Records, in the skinny, curved multicolor forms of this painting. 

Madison grew up listening to his parents telling stories of the music they would hear at Chicago’s Club DeLisa, where Herman Blount (later to become Sun Ra) got his start. Free form jazz opened Madison to unique forms of process from a young age, and in the words of philosopher Philip Alperson “in improvisational activity, freedom seems to be on display.”

Text by Katherine Pill, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL