Bruce Richards at Sea View

Bruce Richards, Clef (2020). Oil on linen, 19.5 x 14.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Sea View, Los Angeles. Photo: Nice Day Photo.

One of the most striking paintings in Soundings, a retrospective of the Ohio-born, San Bernardino-raised, UC Irvine-educated artist Bruce Richards, depicted a Red Delicious apple with a hefty bite taken out of it. If you stared at the wound in its white flesh, painted with such precise, painstaking detail that you could almost taste its tart crispness, your spine might have tingled with déjà vu. The bite marks resemble the wings of an insect, or maybe the trunk of a skeleton. The background has been sucked away, suspending the subject in an eerie, green-hued gradient. This mysterious isolation of the subject matter invites additional questions: Why an apple? Why this shade of red? Stepping closer, you’d see that the grooves in the apple’s flesh couldn’t possibly be made by human teeth, a painterly trick reminiscent of René Magritte (who painted his fair share of apples, too). “Ceci n’est pas une pomme,” you’d think, glancing at the checklist in hopes that the title might clear up this riddle. It does. Adam’s Ribs (1990) recasts the subject as a visual summation of our origin story. As if to hammer in the punchline, an identical sculpture of the forbidden fruit sat, ominously, on a bookshelf to the right. The title: Eve (1989).

These works are textbook examples of Bruce Richards’ approach, honed over the past 60 years. He grabs your attention with representations of everyday objects charged with allegorical trappings, even if he leaves it up to you to connect the interpretive dots. After spending summers in high school working in a commercial art studio, specializing in mechanical drawing, he enrolled at the University of California, Irvine during the 1960s, where at the time most of the faculty (Tony DeLap, Craig Kauffman, Robert Irwin) spoke the language of minimalism.¹ With a couple of exceptions—a notable one being Vija Celmins—he admitted feeling like an odd duck. “Drawing,” Richards told me dryly, shortly after his exhibition at Sea View opened, “was considered a nineteenth-century skill.” To fit in, he jumped on the minimalist bandwagon, making conceptual paintings in which he would stretch rope and twine across black canvases to explore the process of painting itself. But by the late 1970s, he had returned to representation with a renewed vigor, painting bright, lucid objects in blank voids of nothingness. He’s been doing this ever since.

The Sea View exhibition, Soundings—a retrospective of 15 paintings and one sculpture created between 1981 and 2023—investigated the cognitive triangulations among artist (who poses ideas), art-object (which visualizes them), and viewer (who derives meaning by tapping into underground reservoirs of experience, thought, and emotion). While Richards heavily references both folklore and historical events (Washington’s Dilemma [2007], for example, does both by depicting a pair of cherries), his paintings work more as open-ended templates rather than puzzles to be solved. Human figures are always absent from Richards’ paintings, even if our fingerprints are all over them (a half-eaten apple, a burning match, a spilled glass of milk), suggesting that unexplained stories are unfolding just beyond the frame. Little wonder that the show’s title draws from a method of measuring the depth of bodies of water, unquantifiable with the naked eye.

Richards’ inspirations reflect an omnivorous cultural appetite: Aesop’s fables, Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics, references to art history. Many of his paintings seem to comment on political events; Nightcap (2009), for example, which depicts a bottle of Dom Perignon dwarfed by a massive fire exploding from its mouth, evokes the corporate greed that led to the Great Recession. Yet to describe these paintings as unidirectional political statements is to miss Richards’ point; to the contrary, the abstruse nature of the subject matter lends itself to countless interpretations. In Clef (2020), thick serpent-like bands of fire wind around a tire suspended in space, creating the elegant signature of the work’s musical title. While burning tires are widely used as messy and toxic symbols of protest against state authority (in this case, the image’s calligraphic shape, with its subtle resemblance to Arabic script, gestures to conflicts in the Middle East), there’s nothing uncontrolled about the image. Instead, nodding to the clef or “key” that sets the pitch of a musical score, Richards elevates the burning tire into a koan-like symbol that sparks more questions than answers.

Since abandoning abstraction for representation in the late ’70s, Richards has taken pride in his rigidity of purpose and the absence of evolution in his work. Look closer, however, and you’ll find small departures. Paradise Lost (2023), the most recent painting presented in the show, abandons his explicit painterly style in favor of a faint pencil and oil-painted sketch of a woman’s shoe upon a blue textured background. Drawn on raw, unprimed linen that creates a rougher surface than most of his other works, the image evokes Cinderella’s glass slipper in the moments before midnight. There’s a childlike urgency to this image that the others lack, like you could blink and it would disappear. While the slipper still does its share of the interpretive heavy lifting—an allusion, perhaps, to our provisional existence in the face of ecological disaster—here, the background and subject are in tension, one threatening to swallow the other whole. It’s as if Richards is painting for a world in which he will no longer exist.

“Minimalism to me is a short essay,” Richards told me. “You can only keep reducing it before it disappears altogether.” Richards ultimately rejected its hyper-focus on observational perception, finding more inspiration in current events and cultural ether than the spare purity of space and line. Nevertheless, Richards’ practice shares with conceptual art an obsession with presence—that there is no substitute for the experience of standing in front of an artwork beckoning you to step closer as the cogs in your mind start to turn. Richards also shares with his minimalist and conceptual predecessors a belief that the viewer’s participation is, in fact, part of the artwork, the artist’s intervention being just the starting point. At the end of the day, Richards’ painterly “soundings” work as screens or reflections rather than images—the private connections made between viewer and object become the center of each work.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 37.

India Mandelkern is a historian and writer. She is writing a book about the art and politics of street lighting in Los Angeles.

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