Christopher Reiger this now, like the beginning, again and again 2006 watercolor, gouache and marker on stretched Arches paper 25" x 25"

I'm finding it harder and harder to leave this work alone. I regularly see Christopher Reiger's vibrant images in my head when I'm not in front of them, and they never look the same to me when I return to look again.

I didn't know what to make of Reiger's painting when I first came across it. Even the encounter itself was a little quirky, since it involved a successful online bid for a 2001 work he had generously contributed to a small benefit assembled to help a mutual friend with green card expenses. The piece is much more abstract than most of his work I've seen, but it seems to inform, and is informed by, all the others. It's the first thing I look at every time I walk into the room where it's currently propped against a window. In a large, very busy salon-hung environment of competing images, that's just weird.

I understand from the press release for his show at AG Gallery, "Mongrel Truth", that Reiger's art is supposed to be bound up with our age's generally problematic relationship to the natural world and grounded in the artist's own youthful, very likely profound (and continuing) experience of nature in an Eden most of the people who see the paintings and drawings can barely imagine. But the art doesn't stop there, for his painted-paper images of plants and animals are neither entirely innocent in their nature nor entirely abused by modern man's distraction with his own constructions.

They have been redrawn by and for an anxious, creative age which can leave neither inherited nor created sciences and myths alone. I suspect neither nature itself nor these intense paintings and drawings will sit still for any of us now.

Christopher Reiger a dead silent cock 2006 watercolor, gouache, sumi ink and marker on stretched Arches paper 25" x 25"

[images from the artist]