Blake Rayne
July 23 – August 22, 2025 | Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York
accrochage 3 is a summer installation of paintings, photographs, and sculpture by artists at Miguel Abreu. Included in the show are works by Alex Carver, Liz Deschenes, Rochelle Goldberg, Kate Mosher Hall, Dana Lok, Scott Lyall, Beaux Mendes, Jean-Luc Moulène, Paul Pagk, R. H. Quaytman, Eileen Quinlan, and Blake Rayne.
View of "Blake Rayne," 2016–17. Foreground: A Line, 2013. Background, from left: Untitled,
2010; Untitled, 2010. Photo: Peter Molick.
Blake Rayne
BLAFFER ART MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON
I have seen the work of Blake Rayne in bits and pieces over the years, and in each instance I have been puzzled by what I like to call the ugly ducklings nestled within his installations. By this I mean the one work out of a gaggle of beauties that seems to be deliberately, aggressively out of place. For example, the yogurt container–cum–projection screen perched on the windowsill of Campoli Presti's London gallery back in 2012 (Yogurt Cinema, 2014). In a mostly pristine exhibition, it stood out like a sore thumb.
Sometimes the clash makes sense. The decision to hang paintings next to their wooden transport crates worked marvelously in the 2008 exhibition "Dust of Suns" at Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York, reminding us, once again, that canvases are objects, too. I therefore waited with bated breath for Rayne's midcareer retrospective, curated by Javier Sánchez Martínez, in which the ugly ducklings, with the additional context that only such overviews can provide, would finally become glorious swans.
Or so I thought. Instead of finding peaceful resolution, Rayne's oeuvre seems at war with itself. Take, for example, the atrium-like entry gallery, the first of the show's two rooms, in which Rayne's well-regarded series of canvases that have been folded, sprayed, and sewn (in that order) are understandably highlighted. However, as if to slight their elegance, a gang of incompatible objects—a book of felt (A Line [Almanac], 2013), glasses on a wood table next to a plant in a cardboard box (Table of Contents, 2010), a plastic bottle (Untitled, 2016)—loiters at the center of the room. I suppose the two sets (paintings and things) share a readymade quality. But even so, their visual incongruity overshadows any sense of filiation.
The placement of works in the second room only accentuates the discord. A small squiggly red, white, and blue canvas, Untitled, 2012, neighbors five of Rayne's iconic wall works from the series "Cover Letter," 2010, featuring felt letter a's drooping off their canvases onto the floor. Since I don't think an homage to Brice Marden's "Cold Mountain" paintings or Robert Morris's antiforms is intended, I can only assume that the disjunction between pictorial and sculptural, smooth and textured, line and letter, is the goal here.
Everywhere you turn, unlike is pitted against unlike, most jarringly whenever one's gaze crosses a towering, eclectically composed mobile of T-shirts, 3-D letters, and a bicycle hanging in the middle of the room. One corner of the room does, however, approach legibility: A pair of Day-Glo, dye-sublimation-printed abstract canvases draped with equally garish vinyl garlands, both Untitled, 2010, are a canny criticism of the arbitrary, decorative impulse underlying so much of today's computer-generated painting. Bracketing these is a pile of the aforementioned felt a's, A Line, 2013, and an André Cadere–esque pole. Altogether, the trio surveys the multiple ways in which color can be used as a sign.
Coming from a lesser artist, such cacophony might indicate a confused mind. But works such as Untitled, 2011, a panel onto which a chart from Cynthia and Harrison White's art-historical text Canvases and Careers (1965) has been silk-screened, show that Rayne is no dummy. The graphic lists by year the number of paintings that each of the Impressionists made over the course of their careers, documenting in numeric form their respective moments of breakthrough. Rayne is all too aware of the complicity between the making and the marketing of art. And indeed, interpretations of his work have tended toward over-cerebralization, earnestly shrouding it in a cloud of semio-speak (abetted by Rayne himself, it must be said). While there is something admirable and even necessary about linking such an artistic practice to the digital and the socioeconomic, I fear that this body of work's most striking feature—namely, the violence of its juxtapositions—has been somewhat downplayed in the artist's critical reception.
It is exceedingly ironic that an oeuvre so hostile to any overarching narrative should so often be explained by one. For it is hard to find a practice with a comparable level of purposeful discontinuity and obfuscation. Rayne's work is neither pastiche nor bricolage, neither assemblage nor pure shock. It would seem that the artist seeks above all to preempt totalization of his practice by any interpretive system, going so far as to refuse to establish a system in the first place. The interpreter's frustration would be akin to sexual frustration, were it not for the fact that the work is so decidedly unerotic. Therefore, the closest thing I can come up with is that emblem of mechanized frustration, the bachelor machine, minus Duchamp's irony and duplicity.
—Paul Galvez
‘Blake Rayne: Cabin of the Accused,’ exhibition view, Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston
Proposing Painting as a Form of Refusal by Anthony Hawley
Blake Rayne's first midcareer survey is full of linguistic disruptions and quiet repetitions, bringing to mind Bartleby the scrivener's disarming resistance.
HOUSTON — As our 45th president's chief white house strategist tells the media to "keep their mouth shut," as the newly appointed press secretary chastises everyone for unfairly misrepresenting the 2017 inauguration crowds, and as Kellyanne Conway transmutes alternative facts into reality, one wonders what kind of refusal might counter refusal itself. Given a political machine working overtime to silence any competing versions of the truth, how does one counterattack a far right-extremism that touts falsehoods as "telling it like it is"? Like Tom Huhn, chair of Visual and Critical Studies at the School for Visual Arts in New York, put it in a recent piece in the New Yorker, "Part of what makes Trump attractive to many is that he practices a kind of great refusal himself, saying no to just about everything, and thereby appearing to be on the side of human beings liberating themselves from restrictions and hierarchies." As we enter a global political climate where the alt-right is on the rise and a large constituency is convinced that it's being "liberated" by a particular form of refusal, how does one form a refusal of another kind, one that resists and retrieves difference?
One avenue might be something akin to Herman Melville's infamous "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street." In it, a Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk who, after an intense period of impressive work, simply refuses to make another copy or do any of the other office tasks expected of him. Whenever the lawyer asks Bartleby to do something, Bartleby quietly utters, "I would prefer not to." The phrase beguiles the lawyer: It's not exactly a bold-faced rebuttal, nor is it walk-out, a workers' strike on the streets. While the lawyer continues to press Bartleby to do various tasks, the scrivener instead does less and less. Bartleby eventually starts living in the office as he maintains his staunch and paralyzing "I would prefer not to."
I thought about Bartleby while viewing Blake Rayne: Cabin of the Accused at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. Rayne's first midcareer survey is full of linguistic disruptions and quiet repetitions, bringing to mind the scrivener's disarming resistance. Wall Street doesn't know the act of "preferring not to" — the simple statement has so much power not just because it interrupts but because it also creates a lingering silence in its lack of alternatives. For me, Rayne's oeuvre and exhibition embody a similar act in the various refusals.
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Blake Rayne, Untitled, 2013, acrylic & walnut shell on canvas, 24 x 18 inches
Blake Rayne: Cabin of the Accused
22 October 2016 - 18 March 2017
Blaffer Art Museum
4173 Elgin Street
Houston, TX 77004
1301PE is pleased to announce the opening of Blake Rayne: Cabin of the Accused, at Blaffer Art Museum, the first midcareer survey of the New-York-based artist. The exhibition features major works completed from 2003 to the present which showcase the breadth of his work in various media including in painting, sculpture, printmaking, and installation.
Blake Rayne, installation view, courtesy of Campoli Presti, Paris
Blake Rayne
Paris
22 September - 15 October 2016
Campoli Presti
6 rue de Braque
4 rue de Braque, third floor
75003 Paris
Campoli Presti is pleased to announce Blake Rayne’s eight solo exhibition with the gallery.
A central figure in shaping current debates about painting, Rayne’s places painting within a economy of signs, revealing the components of the pictorial language and the processes through which they are defined.
Rayne’s last series of works relate to his interest in recording sequential streams of movement into painting, drawing a continuous wandering line throughout the picture plane. Rayne’s lines shift between their uncontrolled direction and their geometrical determination, namely the frame.
In this new series of paintings, a white looping line is created by a steel banding stencil that travels around the edges of the canvas. The line is lightly dusted with colored layers of sprayed acrylic paint. The paperclips that initially held the banding together were released to allow for expansion into final shape of each of the line compositions.
The repeated use of stencil techniques in Rayne’s practice reveals a script of image production through an operation that belongs to the applied arts. Other activities that conventionally belong to a painter’s domain such as folding, spraying, stretching and rolling also form part of the catalogue of procedures that has allowed Rayne to reveal, mask and test painting’s historical forms.
PARIS INTERNATIONALE
19–23 October 2016
51, avenue d'Iéna, 75116 Paris
1301PE is pleased to participate in Paris Internationale. We are presenting works by Fiona Banner, Fionna Connor, Kirsten Everberg, Judy Ledgerwood, Jorge Méndez Blake, Ana Prvački, Blake Rayne, Diana Thater and Pae White.
Continuing the sentiment of its inaugural edition, Paris Internationale's 2016 edition will take place at 51 Avenue d'Iéna Paris, a hôtel particulier built in 1897, most notably known as the Parisian residence and salon of prominent art collector Calouste Gulbenkian. From October 18th to the 23rd, the four story mansion, which spans over 3,000 m2, will host 60 participants including 53 galleries and 7 project spaces hailing from 19 countries. Echoing the plural identities of the participants, the building will feature a mosaic of rooms with strikingly specific characteristics. Responding to the current climate of art fairs in regards to both its production and reception, Paris Internationale is a joint initiative from 5 emerging galleries; Crèvecoeur, High Art, Antoine Levi, Sultana and Gregor Staiger, as a collective attempt to develop an appropriate model for fostering new advanced initiatives in contemporary art.
Campoli Presti
London
223 Cambridge Heath
Rd London E2 0EL
Paris
6 rue de Braque
75003 Paris
http://www.campolipresti.com/exhibitions.html
SculptureCenter is hosting its benefit exhibition from February 3rd through 5th at New York's Maccarone gallery at 98 Morton Street.
Featured artists include Sanford Biggers, Louise Bourgeois, Petah Coyne, Dan Graham, Camille Henrot, Louise Lawler, Margaret Lee, Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen, Haley Mellin, Claes Oldenburg, Coosje Van Bruggen, Martin Puryear, Blake Rayne, Ugo Rondinone, Sterling Ruby, Richard Serra, and more.
February 3 - 5, 2015
Maccarone
98 Morton Street
New York, NY 10014
tel 212 431 4977
fax 347 394 0043
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 AM - 6:00PM