Contributed by Jason Andrew / It’s refreshing and a little humbling to walk into a gallery and be blitzed by art that’s cleverly derived from years of play, probing, and practice. Rick Briggs’s solo show at Satchel Projects shows us how open-ended and liberating painting can be.
Briggs has always been a man-about-art. A native of Philadelphia, he has been a mainstay of the Brooklyn art scene for decades. Over the years, his work has bounced between abstraction and representation. At the height of a figurative period appeared pathos-tinged paintings that took shape in a pseudo-autobiographical series Briggs titled “Painter Man.” Based on an illustration from a 1950s coloring book his neighbor Katherine Bradford handed to him, he humorously explored issues of identity and class while coming to terms with a sense of his “own anonymity within the art world.” Since then, Briggs has commingled non-objectiveness and figuration, while on occasion inserting references to his day job as a house painter to sharpen the work’s physicality and tension—paint sticks, fuzzy rollers, rim peels of dried paint.
As the show title “I Love Painting + Painting Loves Me” implies, this is a dialogue between the artist and the activity of painting, as opposed to the artist in dialogue with his audience. This alternate approach brings a pronounced intimacy to Briggs’s work. Each piece feels impulsive, a variation on action and direction, mood and temper. The big painting that carries the title of the show is referential to Brigg’s crossbar stretcher paintings. Though not itself from this series, the work is quartered into chromatic compartments of red, yellow, green, and blue. A kind of painter’s escutcheon, it addresses differing representations and sentiments while indulging the antics of a schoolboy. The top right features a collage page blasted with a prism of spray paint; the bottom right the scribbled text of the painting’s title; the left side paint rollers sticking out like binoculars at eye level, with a single one jutting out crotch-high.
When I was a kid, Life Savers hard candy was my favorite. Briggs revisits the trademark sweet in the show’s largest painting, Life Saver, which features nothing but tall bands of fruity color: cherry, lemon, lime, and orange. More than a few great artists have observed that art itself can be lifesaving. Jack Tworkov, in one of his most revealing journal entries, penned during a train ride to RISD in April 1980, confessed that he’d seen making art “not merely as a ‘way of life,’ but as a way to save my life.”
Let’s Dance is an insouciantly painted freestanding “wrapped painting.” Making the most of the painters’ drop cloth, Briggs uprights the spills and splashes and stretches them around a rudimentary construction of two-by-fours. Borrowing the title from David Bowie’s chart-topping song, the work is certainly lively and dancerly, but it also wryly calls to mind ornery old Ad Reinhardt’s remark that sometimes sculpture is “something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.”
Paradise, one of eight paintings made between 2018 and 2022 hanging salon-style, is a vibrant work tagged with flares of blue and green spray paint, with four Behr paint chip samples glued to the surface — Unmellow Yellow, Laser Lemon, Joyful Orange, and Paradise of Greenery. Are we smiling yet? But Briggs can also be dark and moody, as in Ritual Object, a painting that suggests those natural forces that a painter just can’t control. He reminds us how painting can be poetic and open-ended.
Finding a shape, discovering a form, falling into a color — these may be all just part of the build-up for any painter, but for Rick Briggs it’s more. It’s plowing ahead after the start of a random action, remaining faithfulto one’s own personal history, while hugging compositional irreverence.
“Rick Briggs: I Love Painting + Painting Loves Me,” Satchel Projects, 526 West 26th Street, #913, New York, NY. Through May 10, 2025.
About the author: Jason Andrew is an independent curator and writer based in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. Follow him on Instagram: @jandrewarts
Such a clear-eyed tribute for such thrilling paintings. Thanks!
Great insights for a really great show! Go and see it!