Southern California artist Roland Reiss is best known for his miniature dioramas and flower paintings, but Red Edge marks an earlier, transformative period during which he was directly engaging and questioning contemporary artistic idioms. Reiss began working with plastics in the early 1960s to, in his words, “move away from the brushstrokes, paint, and canvas of the Abstract Expressionists....The technical elements of painting could be replaced with new surfaces, colors, textures, reflectivities, and physical strength.” Red Edge is one of a series of works he created by making latex molds of ceiling panels used to diffuse fluorescent lights, then spraying the molds with polyester resin and backing them with fiberglass. The resulting honeycomb-textured surface both reflects light, due to the use of industrial paint, and lends itself to a perception of gradated color, depending on how light hits the beveled edges of each cell.

The slick surfaces of Reiss’ early work and the emphasis on color and perception recall those of Finish Fetish and Light and Space artists. At the same time, by assigning decisions around the size, shape, and texture of the work to the casting process, Reiss participates in contemporary debates on painting. Straddling the mediums of painting and sculpture, Red Edge exhibits clarity and openness of design that characterized the vanguard of American painting in the 1960s.

Roland Reiss began working with plastics in the early 1960s in order, in his words, “to move away from the brushstrokes, paint, and canvas of the Abstract Expressionists. The technical elements of painting could be replaced with new surfaces, colors, textures, reflectivities, and physical strength.” Red Edge is one of a series of works he created by making latex molds of ceiling panels used to diffuse fluorescent lights, then spraying the molds with polyester resin in candy-colored hues and backing them with fiberglass. The resulting honeycomb-textured surface reflects light, generating an optical effect that causes it to appear to vibrate. As Reiss described it, “You have the surface of [the] painting itself moving in space.”

Exhibition label: Light, Space, Surface: Works from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021, Carol S. Eliel.