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Reggie Burrows Hodges, On Your Mark: Lean In, 2020

Painting can capture and display moments of life that have become too rare, those where anything goes. Where everyone feasts, frolics and relaxes, perhaps in the cottony depths of a sofa. Certain painters have a clear gift for creating these scenes and these worlds, capturing indolence, evanescence, celebrations. Under their brush, the paint floods the canvas with lights and colors, tinting it with a moist or diaphanous sheen that makes you shudder. The paintings of American Reggie Burrows Hodges exhale a type of heat. They sweat through all their pores, and wet the lines of the landscape around them. Their own outlines vanish into spectacular enjoyment.

Silhouetted, and with a thick brush that seems to carry a bubbling, pictorial energy, the sports-people staged by this African-American artist are similarly carried away by their activities. They shake up everything in their path. The theme of sport is rare in paintings, as if photography and television had copyrighted the portrayal of it. From this point of view, Reggie Burrows Hodges puts painting back in the game.

Represented by the Dowling Walsh (Rockland, Maine) and Karma (New York) galleries.