Joe Reihsen is a Los Angeles based artist whose existential inquiry into abstraction seeks to liberate perception from the confines of routine, while forging a more grounded and authentic mode of engagement with self, others, and the world. Rooted in the ever-shifting cultural and atmospheric landscape of Los Angeles, Reihsen’s work absorbs and reflects the city's layered energies: the friction of urban sprawl, the expansive calm of the Pacific, and the incandescent saturation of West Coast light. These elements establish the framework for his painterly language, where the dialogue between observation and intervention, resembling aerial views of terrestrial formations, grants the viewer entry points into psychological terrains.
In his most recent body of work for his solo exhibition at Adrian Sutton Gallery in Brussels, Reihsen continues this dialogue by juxtaposing water-based pigments with layers of oil paint. The aqueous materials are poured and allowed to roam freely across the canvas, forming translucent veils and irregular stains that mirror organic phenomena—fractured coastlines, mineral veins, shifting sediment, resembling occasionally California’s complex topography. Once the surface settles, the artist re-enters with oil-based gestures, marks that either accentuate, interrupt, or reframe the forms already present. There is a pulse beneath the surface—a subtle oscillation between chaos and clarity, movement and stillness, density and light. The result is a kind of visual tension—structured yet accidental yet intentional, an elemental metaphor of fictional terrains and liminal mindscapes rather than specific geographies. Each work invites slow looking and a contemplative engagement with how forms emerge and dissolve, how perception itself is shaped by what is hidden, revealed, or transformed through time. Reihsen’s ability to harness the intrinsic qualities of paint—its liquidity, opacity, unpredictability—allows him to transcend the physical limitations of the medium and imbue the canvases with a quiet, immersive intensity that defies categorization, moving beyond abstraction as a formal language and into the realm of embodied experience. The compositions are not simply constructed—they are cultivated. The artist surrenders to the materiality of the medium, allowing paint itself to become a protagonist. His process is neither entirely controlled nor entirely improvised; it is a choreography between the artist and the medium, where gravity, absorption, and surface resistance serve as collaborators. The act of painting becomes an alchemical exchange, one that blurs the line between deliberate mark-making and the unconscious flow of natural phenomena.
“I’m interested in the way abstraction can be used to represent the natural world, but also to create something entirely new and unexpected,” Reihsen notes. “I want my paintings to be a place where people can escape the everyday and explore their own imaginations.”
Reihsen describes his practice as an act of cartography—mapping and mirroring not just the exterior world, but the interior states of perception, presence, and imagination. His paintings do not declare; they invite. They are portals into a meditative state, where the eye travels and the mind lingers. They resonate as distilled encounters between him and the natural forces he courts, revealing abstraction not only as a formal pursuit, but as an all-encompassing philosophy.
Exhibition text by Luana Hildebrandt
