ZACH REINI | ENDGAME

Press Release

Denver-based artist Zach Reini uses iconic American imagery and a minimal insertion of the artist’s hand to bastardize and recode the viewer’s relation to cultural symbology. In relation to Hito Steyerl’s essay In Defense of a Poor Image, which is primarily focused on the reproduction of a digital still, Reini implores Steyerl’s alternate definition of a “poor image [as] as an illicit fifth generation bastard of an original image... it often defies patriarchy, national culture, and indeed copyright.” Following the belief of re-contextualizing these are Reini’s paintings which manifest this bastardization through the lens of crisp and decisive destruction.

Reini also implores Steyerl’s theory of the poor image by means of reproduction in his large and visually jarring paintings of Pogs. Tackily colored, bright, and often accompanied by intense phrases or cartoonishly violent imagery, Pogs represent culturally outdated American iconography, but nonetheless serve as once popular centerpieces for an American attitude. Compared to his minimal works, the Pogs stray from traditional graphically or artistically pleasing norms. The fluorescent and holographic circles radiate with visual noise, yet Reini’s playful pocketing of imagery gives the paintings a Stella- esque geometric fluidity that conveys the once obnoxious as lost cultural artifacts. Reini again turns the iconography in on itself by bastardizing an iconic image, this time to re-contextualize the beauty current culture erased. Through beautiful and limited means, Reini accomplishes a definitive blow to the ivory tower of American innocence forcing those once idealized symbols to be viewed as lewd, secretive subjects, as illicit back room dealers of easily digestible happiness, as shadow-world puppet masters. Though the actions of these figures are physically concealed, their newly conscripted purpose resonates through Reini’s manipulated scenes in his manifested world of innocence-as-transgressor.