catalogue essay, February 1999

Richard Overfield - Redreaming the South

"Undermining the integrity of an image is a way of emphasizing the extent to which the uniqueness of any image is, finally, a hoax. Looking long and hard at the components which mislead or subvert is as good a way as any for getting at the truth" - Richard Overfield

Overfield Overview

Overfield is a maker of stories both comic and serious using both personal reflections and the narratives of the many landscapes and regions he has called home. Using squares within squares, paintings within paintings and cultures within cultures, Overfield implodes various histories - art world, regional, psychological and social in his journeys through his past present and future. These paintings possess multilayered and multi-dimensional meanings delving into the complexities of truth.

Agnes Martin meets Andy Warhol

In "Redreaming the South", hard-edged abstraction frame "softer" representational narratives. Exteriors are all solid bands of color referencing geometrical abstraction from the 60's and 70's. Interior narratives are comprised of (usually) one small image that is repeated in a grid pattern. The pattern rotates, so like the text the image is often upside down and sideways, generating both a representational image and one that is abstracted and obscured.

Phenomenology

Overfield struggles to uncover the essential qualities of knowing and "truth". After working with landscape and other figurative imagery, in the mid 70's he left representation to explore the essential elements of painting and the nature of knowledge. The fixed order of the grid, which he has used in various forms since the early 70's, freed Overfield to pursue issues such as rhythm, illusion and the meditative aspects of repetition. Later, upon returning to representational content, "the grid allowed me to subvert the tyranny of representational rigidity. In an age of image glut and saturation, I could force images to become more than a reference to reality locked in a relationship with a fiction created by words. Words were never enough. A single image was never enough."

Kant meets Crazy Horse

A keen attention to historical and social concerns comes into play in "Redreaming the South". In "New Mexican Cutthroats", Overfield muses on the Rio Grande and the various cutthroats - fish and Europeans that appeared and made a life for themselves, often at the expense of others, in and near it's shores. Here, as he does in "Dancing with Monsters: To the Top of the Mountain" and in many other works, Overfield pointedly points to a collision/collusion of cultures. "Dancing with Monsters: To the Top of the Mountain", tells the story of a controversial Apache Chief named Chatto. During the 1880's he fought the Europeans but later realized the hugeness of their forces and acted as a scout for the US Army to try to bring the Apache wars to an end, winding up an outcast in both worlds. In "Mariachi", the repeated image of a maroon Mariachi standing with his horn in front of a bull continues Overfield's questioning of the (multiple)meanings of stereotypes and their relationship(s) to memory. Who is this Mariachi? this Indian? this fish? Are they cultural stereotypes, "real" memories, dreamlike images, historical figures? Whatever the answers, these questions compel us to look, to think, to wonder and the painting's formal elements- repeated and flipped stripes and circles hold our attention and delight our eye.

Social Psychopaths

Overfield reveals psychological social space with "The Videopath" ; "It's Partytime in the U.S. of A.", and "Dancing with Monsters: Red Men Blue Women". Videopath chronicles one man's fight against the power of television to control our lives and sensibilities. The other two paintings depict nightmarish scenarios. A naked woman and a downcast man "party" very unfestively in Partytime. This painting, like Videopath, deals with excess and decay in contemporary culture. Featuring a creepy cabaret of sorts where a little nude woman frolics with monsters, Dancing with Monsters stems from a dream a friend of the artist's had where she felt helpless. The heros or anti-heros in these paintings, like Chatto, go, "against the flow", fighting overwhelming odds with no forseeable way to "buck" the system.

Transcendence

Some of Overfield' more luminous color work can be seen in "Cosmologium Hysterica" and "Dancing with Monsters: Dreams of the North", and his most abstract in "Trail of Tears" . Another way, another truth, another reality are searched for in these paintings as the interior images become less representational and more abstract, allowing a spiritual or magical element to enter the picture.

The Truth is in the Viewing

Overfield offers rich visual and textual fragments merging history painting with hard-edge abstraction. Utilizing the push -pull of oppositional forces and plying both consciously and unconsciously accessed knowledge, he takes us on a journey to the netherworlds of the imagination deeply rooted in personal and collective histories. We are asked, no, it is demanded we join in, adding our imaginings, stories and histories to his, to (re)create our own memories and magic and to find our own "truths", whatever form they may take.

"Don't look at me for a straight answer" - Richard Overfield

essay by Amy Berk , artist, critic and educator

San Francisco, February 1999