ReeL's work is suddenly showing up around town with regularity, sometimes at the Delphine Gallery and coming soon to Roy, but perhaps the most complementary exhibit is this current show on display in the fractured maze of the UCSB Faculty Club. ReeL fits in here, both because of his art's light-headed, light-filled aura, and its amicably jagged geometry--not unlike Charles Moore's famous (or infamous) architectural scheme. Where better to see paintings than a place in which architecture defies rules, but obeys the rule of spirit?

 

With these paintings--variations on  a firmly established theme in his work--ReeL mostly dishes out joie de vivre, American style. The Euro-filter meets the 'burbs in a piece like "House on Hope Avenue," a friendly tangle of lines wih an almost improvisational flair atop blocks of color not always corresponding to the linear rule on top. Little points of tension are enough. In "Pool (Yellow)," ReeL tilts backward, toward the realm of abstraction, isolating the visual ingredients that spell poolside life in our minds, but with a casual disregard for logic. Sometimes, darkness sneaks in while you're admiring the retinal sun-bath sensation. Suddenly, there's a piece called "Let's Kill Each Other Off for God," with religious symbols floating--and presumably fighting--in an otherwise relaxed interior setting.

 

"Artist's Studio," finds flowers, art supplies, and hints fo a table, wall, and window, more evocation than reportage. It's the ReeL effect in action, part French, part Santa Barbaran--the American Riviera, we're told--and warmly appealing by nature.