New acrylic paintings on birch wood boxes will be presented. Roth’s artworks create a tension between painting and objects as well as two-dimensional and three-dimensional planes, while exploring space, optics and visual perception. They are each uniform and compact in size with a reductive palette, yet the artist does not feel limited proportionally in his selection of bold compositions, grand geometric shapes and eye-popping colors. In fact, the predetermined confines push the boundaries in every direction and the corners become the focal point that expand the real and illusory space. 

Richard Roth

A Statement From The Artist

In spite of their diminutive stature and stark vocabulary, my paintings involve my interest in play, the quotidian, and the "retinal." These paintings are anti-heroic...formal abstractions that flirt with popular culture. They claim object status (as opposed to window status) enabling them to tap into the expansive 3-D polychrome universe – product and package design, nature, architecture, masks, custom cars, and fashion. The paintings’ box-like proportions allow a wide range of new issues, both formal and content-related, to enrich my practice and its conversation with the contested legacy of modernism.

At present, painting for me is like returning home. I painted for many years, then for approximately ten years my practice became more conceptual – creating collections of contemporary material culture. I returned to painting in 2006 with a renewed and revitalized interest, fueled by conceptualism and informed by postmodern attitudes.

"Generally, art wavers between being closer to a book or closer to a rug – more conceptual or more decorative. Our work is somewhere in between. We try to make conceptual rugs."                                                                            - Vitaly Komar, on the work of Komar and Melamid

"A famous sonnet by William Wordsworth begins, 'Nuns fret not their convent's narrow room, / and hermits are contented with their cells; / and students with their pensive citadels.' Wordsworth's point is that what nuns, hermits, and students do is facilitated rather than hindered by the confines of the formal structures they inhabit; because those structures constrain freedom (they remove, says Wordsworth, 'the weight of too much liberty'), they enable movements in a defined space....That is why Wordsworth reports himself happy 'to be bound / Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground.' It is a scanty plot because it is bounded, and because it is bounded, it can be the generator of boundless meanings."

          - Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence