Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Richard Hawkins
American; 21st-century
New York, NY: Greene Naftali (Exhibition: Richard Hawkins: New Paintings)
74%
Fruits on a Scarlet Lake and Vermilion Tablecloth (after Bonnard). 2025. Oil on canvas in artist's frame
On the one hand, it shows you the tough place painting's in today that Hawkins, to feel comfortable attempting Bonnard, had to include those white margins at the top and bottom of his image. They serve as a sort of justification of (apology for?) making a painting at all. On the other hand, it's always an artwork's job to justify itself immanently as well as within art's history, and plus, there are a number of things about those margins that make them more than just conceptual flourishes. For one, Hawkins' uneven handling means that there's loads of raw white ground poking through all over his painting, each instance of which calls out to the strips of blank canvas above and below the image. This involves the margins with the composition without fully integrating them into it. For two, the strips of white are at once well-proportioned to the picture and irregular, almost painterly in themselves: they affirm their clinical, conceptual relationship to the image while also slightly undermining it. If Hawkins has painted a bit too heavily, has arranged his scene a bit too stiffly, to be able to look Bonnard square in the face on painters' terms, he has at least exhibited enough of a sensibility for what a painting is as an object — and what an image is as a type of sign — not to have to stare at his feet. (2025)
New York, NY: Greene Naftali (Exhibition: Richard Hawkins: New Paintings)
62%
3 Jacks for Autumn. 2025. Oil on canvas in artist's frame
The interweaving of so many colors is virtuosic, but it might be merely virtuosic. If there's anything to save this painting from being pure design, it's that it isn't, in fact, a mosaic wherein so many shards of color share a common surface quality. Rather, there's a spectrum of fullnesses and opacities to the paint, and of levels of definition and outline to the forms, that makes the picture's whole surface appear just as variegated as the colors it contains. Look, for instance, at the stalk of green plant that's creeping, at right, up into that field of rusty brown. But unlike Bonnard, who was Hawkins' lodestar for this series of paintings, there's not much to ground or to center all this variegation — the three floating heads, as well as the cheeky moment of one-point perspective in the space between them, seem actively to flaunt the painting's centerlessness. Centerless paintings are fine, of course, but they tend to require something for our experience to latch onto that takes the place of their would-be pictorial core. (Something that turns them into a literal object or a conceptual tool.) This painting lacks something like that, so it is, at its best moments, impressive and pretty. (2025)