Abstract Painting With Reginald Sylvester II

I’m at Maximillian William gallery on Mortimer Street, London, stood in front of Reginald Sylvester II’s painting Cup of Water the Colour of Fire, and I’m trying to work out how it is doing so much at once. As his canvas, Reginald has stretched an olive, army surplus shelter-half, creased along the folds it was issued in, over black rubber.

A shelter-half is one half of a tent. A soldier carries his half and his poles, meets another man carrying the other, and the two parts button together into somewhere to sleep. Reginald has hung the incomplete thing on the wall and let it keep the dampened mood of salvage. Over the top, the colour goes up like a flare. A bloom of orange and crimson breaks open, spread wide across the olive, the way it might if Pollock or de Kooning had got to it, wide-eyed and probably drunk, or the way a paint factory might look the instant it goes up, every barrel split open, red sheeting down the walls and pooling on the floor.

“In working with rubber. I feel I am both confronting and reclaiming its violent, industrious past.”

Reginald is part of a generation that includes Andy Robert and Eric Mack, and is one of the most exciting and most materially minded painters working in the United States. His gestural, expressive brushwork sits on top of raw and inflexible materials, so the work looks – and feels – soft and hard at once.

Reginald is thirty-eight now. He was born near Camp Lejeune and raised mostly in Oakland. His father was a Marine whose service overlaps exactly with the decade Sylvester sources his tents from. He’s called this body of work Refuge, and lately Offering, each name marking a different demand he’s making of the paint.

The rubber underneath the shelter-halves is ordinary stuff from a hardware store, but its supply chain runs back through Congo, where King Leopold’s regime forced rubber tapping at the cost of severed hands. Reginald stretches this material over aluminium, lets the tent fabric splay stiff and half-buttoned on top like something held in place against its will, and only then starts pouring colour. “In working with rubber,” he says, “I feel I am both confronting and reclaiming its violent, industrious past.”

Until Then is Sylvester’s fourth exhibition with Maximillian William — Fitzrovia’s most lively and energetic gallerist — and which opened to coincide with London Gallery Weekend in June. It caps a year that has taken the artist from a derelict brutalist shell on the University of Ghana campus to a studio across the Hudson, close to his adopted hometown of New York.

“The possibilities are endless when you touch soil.”

The new paintings are square, mostly sixty inches, and each follows the same sequence of decisions: rubber first, then the tent assembled over it so the canvas drinks in what the rubber won’t absorb, then the pour. What changes is the weight of association he’s leaning on. The tents date specifically to the years the US Army fielded them during Vietnam, which happen to be the same years Abstract Expressionism was running out of road as the dominant American art style. Reginald paints as though both endings, his father’s war and painting’s own crisis of confidence, are still working themselves out on the same square of rubber.

Before painting, there was Rare Panther, the label he ran with his childhood friend Paulo Wallo, splitting the work between Brooklyn and LA. They printed a hundred t-shirts to start, selling to people they admired, and they ended up on Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt. The panther itself came from Oakland and growing up around the memory of the Black Panthers; the name was Sylvester’s answer to what he figured everyone wants, deep down, which is to feel rare. That instinct for scarcity, for making something people must work to deserve, hasn’t left him. It’s just moved from limited-run tees to the eye trained on the backs of eighteen-wheelers and the grime of a working street in Ridgewood, Brooklyn, where he had his old studio and perfected his craft. “Materials really tell you what type of person you are”, he says, "because you’re reacting to the material.”

Some of the new energy comes from Accra. Last year he spent six weeks in Ghana for the inaugural show at Limbo Museum, working in Tema, an industrial town he describes as close kin to Ridgewood, welding gates with local artisans near a cocoa factory. He came back with the word he keeps returning to, resilience, and a conviction that sits oddly against the salvage aesthetic: “The possibilities are endless when you touch soil.”

The diaspora threads through the titling of the works in the show, the Du Bois and Nkrumah lineage of transatlantic exchange, and through a lesson he borrows from the Oakland painter Raymond Saunders about “not giving so much of ourselves away to an industry we don’t control or own.” I cannot help but feel that the abstraction that is such a powerful visual event in these works, that is saying so much, might be a way of holding something back.

“Materials really tell you what type of person you are.”

In fact, all the titles are revealing. On the Other Side of Blue in Green lifts from the Miles Davis ballad, and the whole show keeps circling that phrase, ‘the other side,’ the same construction as his Accra exhibition, On the Other Side of Languish. Several titles come straight out of scripture. When I Would Do Good, Evil Is Present With Me is Paul, in Romans, on the war between the will and the flesh. Paul’s stuck wanting good and doing harm anyway; Reginald, for his part, is stretching rubber pulled from an atrocity and asking the paint to make something graceful out of it. “We are presently in a state of spiritual warfare,” he says, “I truly believe that.” The earlier Offering paintings were built to absorb a viewer’s anguish, to send someone out of the room lighter, almost the way a confession does. These new works want the same exchange, quieter, the paint “meant to whisper and echo throughout the space.”

That’s the trick of the whole show: for all their heat, these works whisper. I get the impression that Sylvester will continue working in the same vein, salvaging and repurposing, whether buying up EPDM off eBay by the roll or hunting shelter-halves from the exact decade he needs: gathering, one material at a time, whatever the studio calls for that week. His new work is the outcome of an itinerant’s habit of paying attention to the world, wherever he finds himself.