Tony de los Reyes

Though his last solo was held only three months ago in New York, this exhibition looks like a significant step forward for Los Angeles-based painter Tony de los Reyes. His new signature oil alkyd paintings, rendered in a Delftware palette of cerulean, periwinkle, and sky blue against bone white backgrounds, are larger than those he has previously exhibited (while remaining equally surefooted) and deploy a wider array of formats. At one end of the spectrum is The Stranger’s Song, 2004, an intimately scaled tondo depicting two flower bulbs facing each other, like screen stars about to kiss. At the other end is The Last Archipelago, 2004, a ten-foot-wide three-panel work showing a flotilla of tall ships sailing across the open sea. De los Reyes’s speedy, wet-on-wet technique—necessitated in part by how quickly his paint dries—is perfectly suited to rendering curlicue wave crests, which, in the foreground of the latter work, evoke Hokusai’s famous woodblock print The Great Wave. The other paintings alternate between armadas and scenes one can imagine the sailors encountering upon landing on the beaches of de los Reyes’s “last archipelago.” The exhibition coheres as a sort of captain’s log of journeys, painterly and otherwise.