There’s no trick of the moonlight at Rhea Dillon’s show, “Gestural Poetics.” Inside and out, each work happens twice. Dillon’s drawings, nestled in sapele mahogany boxes within the white cube gallery, enact two histories at once. While the moniker “sapele” hails from a Nigerian city, the hardwood was once used to build slave ships, consequently disrupting how to read Dillon’s works against the supposedly neutral space of a gallery. Inset in boxes propped against the walls, her oil-stick drawings of spades emerge in clamorous flesh tones or occasional bursts of yellow or purple. If this exhibition intends to release the recognition of Blackness from an object or commodity and lean into Blackness as a natural form of abstraction, the entirety of the show is clever, verve and precise. Dillon’s sensitivity to Black hyper-visibility recovers a sense of amorphicity for Blackness through reconfiguring canons of representation. In probing questions about this long crisis of recognition and addressability, an intimate relationship between imaging, the world and “the way things are,”  I came to the contradictory question: Is it wonderful that she has created these works or should I be outraged that the world is this sinister?

Paul Soto
2271 W. Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
On view through June 1, 2024