Left: Daniel Reich at his gallery on West Twenty-Third Street in New York. Photo: Paul P. Right: Daniel Reich at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2009. Photo: Ryan McNamara.

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with Daniel Reich was also my first encounter with New York. In January 2003, I came to the city with a small folder of drawings in hand; a friend made a phone call, and suddenly I was in Daniel’s apartment/gallery amid Christian Holstad’s beautiful Life is a Gift installation. We knelt on the floor to lay out the works. I remember him wiry and fresh, pulling out a few hundred-dollar bills from his jeans pocket and buying all of the works I’d come with. Those crumpled bills meant more to me than any subsequent payment I’ve ever received, and on the Greyhound back to Toronto I knew my fortune had changed.

Then there was silence, and I didn’t hear from him for a month. I later learned that this was when Colin de Land had died. Daniel started at Pat Hearn’s gallery; he sought her out specifically because she showed Mark Morrisroe. It was from these two dealers, Pat and Colin, that Daniel found the value system that came to define his métier: a belief in Art above all things, and in its confluence with personality. This wisdom included giving to those special people who gravitated toward him as many big opportunities as possible. I didn’t live in New York and could only witness his small gang periodically, but I remember Nick Mauss and Ken Okiishi stuffing envelopes and hanging paintings not as artists or staff, but as believers in something extraordinary at work.

To me, Daniel always appeared a slightly mystical creature. Yet he possessed, perhaps to a stronger degree, a great number of human frailties: giddy indulgence, obstinate faith, consuming worry. He swanned and he sweated. There are lines we all skirt which Daniel—a symptom of his genius—continually trespassed. Nothing was average or passable in his world, nor was he a perfectionist; things were lost, destroyed—things languished. And yet it was the labor, the ebullience of his rich, deadly smart, radically free-associating mind that made something remarkable out of each and every show. Daniel was a born dealer, not just because he, like most good artists, was otherwise unemployable, but because his eccentricity was alchemy in the gallery. He took risks with his money and with the money of others, and I think he always sincerely believed it would all work out. Spending was like making a wish or saying a prayer; new shoes, or capriciously rebooking airfare was a type of strange magic to augur success.

I remember another conjuring, a performance almost, as we installed my show in fall 2008. Amid the unsettling quiet brought on by the worsening recession, Daniel devised a strategy for painting the gallery—one that was all but invisible to everyone but himself. An assistant went over the gallery walls, already painted in their typical white, with two other hues of white, a “yellow” and a “green.” Daniel conducted the painting with precision, so that narrow swaths were applied here and there, like highlights and shadows, taking up several days of our time in an imperceptible aesthetic labor which I could only understand as wizardry meant to invoke the old rush of collectors who weren’t coming through. On opening night the gallery had its aura, and it worked.

But despite all of his surreptitious magic, it ultimately wasn’t enough. There was a breach in the hull and the part of Daniel that understood the usefulness of life began to ebb when he had to close his gallery, forced out by his own amazing folly and by a world that demanded something more practical. Daniel enjoyed scrappily going up against the hegemony of Chelsea. An inscrutable David, what he proposed was soft, slight, and upset by masculinity. Daniel knew the legacy and aesthetics of the strengths and frailties of homosexuality. We would talk about Tennessee Williams, Denham Fouts, and King Ludwig. He knew the course of lives lived and lost.

Anyone who has had a telephone conversation with Daniel will remember that the sign-off was the hardest part for him. There were various long pauses and rapidly repeated “okays” before the final, hesitant, goodbye. I feel very much like this now, so I want to add two more little remembrances. I’m brought back to one of our earliest emails where he said, “Yes, of course I’m interested in handling the work long-term. In a way it is perfect for me.” Daniel tried to engender his artists with his own delicate gestures of rebellion, and a spirited, cerebral pleasure in beauty. It’s an imbued force, something that will continue to manifest in our best work, which will in turn always be perfect for him. Finally, the last time I saw Daniel was in August. He invited me to the Russian Tea Room and implored me to order the cheapest drink on the menu so he could treat me. I had a peppermint tea and he had several Ivan the Terribles. His conversation frothed with wicked intelligence, jokes, and glumness. I left him with an electric buzz in my gut; I felt happy and proud. I knew that Daniel was one of the last of a kind of rare bird, and I couldn’t believe my luck at having him for a friend. I know that I will miss him for the whole of my life.

Paul P. is an artist living in New York.