John Riepenhoff

Naked Eye

20.04. – 27.05.2023

Opening Thursday, April 20th, 5 – 9pm

The opening will be accompanied by a beer-surprise!

Avenue Jef Lambeaux 23

1060 Saint Gilles, Brussels

Belgium

Hours

Thursday and Friday 2 – 7pm

Saturday 12 – 6pm

and upon appointment

LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS is pleased to present new paintings by Milwaukee-based artist John Riepenhoff. Naked Eye is Riepenhoff’s first solo exhibition in Belgium and presents paintings from his en plein air series “Skies”.

Does the romance of landscape painting rest on the masterful representation of the world outside the window? Is it the precise representation, or the sustenance of the aura of the actual that makes landscape paintings so compelling? John Riepenhoff deliberately sabotages any promise of mastery in Naked Eye by exclusively addressing his subject at night. These are paintings essayed in the dark. Any aura therefore emanates from the process and not the representation. We meet the time of darkness more than the space.

Riepenhoff’s canvases suggest that he met the challenge of the darkness by passing the time making marks, vertical marks, mostly from the top of the canvas to the bottom. When one canvas becomes fully thatched with marks, but the envelope of darkness persists, Riepenhoff, working from a strategic ecology, continues the mark making across the surface of an already filled canvas. So one session of capturing the dark is thereby layered over with another attempt to meet the same dark sky. Riepenhoff is filling space as well as time.

The line’s thickness is determined by the size of the chosen brush. The marks seem metronomic if not mechanical but given the varying shape they’re irregular enough to feel organic.

In some paintings the marks can feel like fronds drooping downward, creating a thicket that prevents us from seeing beyond. This thicket makes the act of discernment a greater challenge even as the artist leaves gaps between the fronds teasing us into thinking that we can peer into layers underneath, layers of an earlier consideration of the same obscurity. Fortified by all of this termiting labor these are not paintings of nothing, hapless graspings of the dark, but rather these marks insist that the field under our purview requires further burrowing of our own to sense through the thicket to the there there.

– Carl Bogner

Barely Visible

April 2–May 27, 2023

Good Weather (Little Rock)

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Handler with: Katy Cowan, Ron Ewert, Max Guy, Sheila Held, Bob Hooper, Hanna Hur, Paula Kamps, Jan Kiefer, Nyeema Morgan, Nick Schutzenhofer, Paul Anthony Smith

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The John Riepenhoff Experience: Mariel Capanna, COBRA, Jacob Goudreault, George Camden Riley, Dylan Spaysky, Yui Yaegashi

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Beer Endowment Good Weather Cold IPA brewed with Lost Forty and label designed by Layet Johnson

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Double Cream Colby (from Clock Shadow Creamery) Cheese Dip made with assistance from Carolyn Oates and Marilyn Riley

Barely Visible is a survey of work by John Riepenhoff—the Milwaukee-based artist, curator, art dealer, and founder/owner of The Green Gallery—spanning over more than a decade and a half that is a solo show which operates simultaneously as a group exhibition. Through the artist’s unique conceptual and collective approach, the exhibition highlights an oft overlooked social potential in art making, reveals an ecological perspective to this interconnectedness, and further emphasizes Good Weather’s familial approach to running a contemporary art gallery.

Riepenhoff has engineered a multi-layered presentation through different ongoing series—including his nighttime plein air paintings, a culinary collaboration for a Double Cream Colby Cheese Dip, The John Riepenhoff Experience, the Beer Endowment Good Weather Cold IPA brewed with Lost Forty (currently available in cans and on tap at the brewer catty-corner from the exhibition space), and the Handler series of sculptures which act as easels to hold other artist’s paintings—to involve more than two dozen other artists and collaborators, including: Mariel Capanna, COBRA, Katy Cowan, Ron Ewert, Jacob Goudreault, Max Guy, Sheila Held, Bob Hooper, Hanna Hur, Layet Johnson, Paula Kamps, Jan Kiefer, Nyeema Morgan, Carolyn Oates, George Camden Riley, Marilyn Riley, Nick Schutzenhofer, Paul Anthony Smith, Dylan Spaysky, and Yui Yaegashi.

Barely Visible by John Riepenhoff is the Milwaukee-based artist’s first solo exhibition with Good Weather and is on view until May 27, 2023, with gallery hours on Saturdays from 1–6 p.m. or by appointment.

https://goodweather.llc/barely-visible.html