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For a painter, Reed Anderson is pretty clever with razor blades. His obsessive paper works, which are both additive and subtractive, are distinguished by thousands of small, geometrically shaped holes. These appear in various guises: in hand-cut bits of the paper ground that are removed to form negative shapes; in pieces that are hand-painted and collaged; and in spray painted, stenciled shapes that appear on the same ground from which they were cut.
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Bay Area artists such as Val Britton and Queena Hernandez, and Portland-based Anna Fidler use finely cut paper as a distinctive element in their painting. Anderson occupies a similar space, but his work is unique in that it employs paper as both a medium and a tool. The cut holes in his flamboyant, biology-inspired works function not only as patterns unto themselves; but also as a stencil for airbrushing patterns onto other parts of his pieces.
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"I enjoy seeing all the history within the materiality of the paper." Anderson explains. "Each crease is a sign of a place or happening…each patch another mark within the complex palimpsest that becomes the finished work." The result has stunning visual texture at close view.
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Look closely at piece like Nuppet Tree and you find even more dimensions unfolding. This "tree" has its own tensions: the marks defining its "branches" — rectangular strips painted in fully saturated primaries, secondaries and solid blacks — couldn’t be more jolting. Against these, the floral clusters of punched-hole patterns seem improbably delicate. The whimsy of the word "Nuppet" suits this picture perfectly.
–LIESA LIETZKE