The city in these paintings is empty and it is dusk, or something like dusk. A color that doesn't quite belong to any hour, magenta bleeding into cobalt, a violet that has no source you can point to in the sky. The buildings are rendered with a precision so exacting it borders on obsession: every window, every setback, every cornice accounted for, traced and cut and stenciled and filled until nothing is left to chance. And yet nothing moves. No cars, no crowds, no single figure crossing a plaza or looking out from behind glass. It is New York, mostly, though it could be read as any dense vertical city built to project permanence; and it is entirely uninhabited, which is strange, because Daniel Rich will tell you these paintings are, in the end, about people. About us. About what we build and why, and what we don't see happening inside it.
That contradiction, structures this solid, made by a man who describes his own life as a state of permanent restlessness, sits at the center of this new body of work, opening this fall at Miles McEnery Gallery in New York. Rich's family history runs three generations of immigration across continents; his own has moved from New York to Berlin and back again, and now, from a house in the North Carolina mountains that he only half-jokingly calls his own magic mountain, he is in the middle of applying for U.S. citizenship, a process that carries its own quiet, specific anxiety about what he can and cannot afford to say. Against all of that, the paintings hold still. They look, as he put it, like the wind could not knock them down. If restlessness is the private weather of the artist's life, permanence is the public face he's built to withstand it, buildings as the thing that doesn't move even when everything else does.
Nobody appears in these paintings, but Rich has come to think of them as portraits all the same —of the people behind the built thing, rather than the thing itself. What he keeps returning to, in conversation, is a kind of civic curiosity that shades into something more uneasy: what is actually happening on the twenty-third floor of a building you pass every day and have never once wondered about until now? Are you being observed from inside it, or is it simply blind, indifferent glass? The city is full of structures we live beside without any real access to what goes on inside them—commerce, governance, whatever quiet machinery keeps a tower lit at 2AM, and Rich's paintings sit in that gap, imagining a kind of parallel universe running alongside our own, visible only as surface. You go to the grocery store. Somewhere above you, on a floor you'll never see, something else entirely is happening, and it is, in its own way, running your life, too.
Rich didn't set out to illustrate any of this. The clarity came late. By his own account, he was well into a year of painting before the pieces connected in his mind, prompted in part by a run of audiobooks he'd been listening to in the studio: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Stefan Zweig's memoir The World of Yesterday, W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz. All three were written, in different forms, by Central European writers watching a familiar world come apart while still tending to the ordinary business of living inside it. Mann's novel strands its characters in an Alpine sanatorium in the years just before the First World War, people who aren't really so ill, who have sectioned themselves off into their own insulated world while history gathers itself outside, apathetic and enraged in equal measure, unable to act and unable to look away. Zweig wrote his memoir as an act of retrieval, cataloguing a Europe that had already been erased by the time he finished it, before leaving for Brazil and, not long after arriving, taking his own life. Sebald's novel follows a man piecing together a buried personal history through the buildings and objects that outlasted the people who built and used them—architecture as a kind of memory that persists longer than anyone's ability to explain it. None of these are books about the present moment. All of them, Rich found, described it anyway.
That recognition that history is rhyming with itself, decades apart, runs under the work as something closer to instinct than argument. Rich, who grew up in Germany, is candid about the discomfort of watching a democracy erode by increments and telling himself, at each stage, that it's still fine, still survivable, still not yet the thing it's becoming. He calls the resulting paintings “sneakily political,” which is its own kind of admission: a foreign-born artist mid-citizenship-process has more at stake in speaking plainly than most, and the work carries its politics the way a lot of the strongest political art has always carried them — coded into subject and color and mood rather than argued outright. There's a lineage for this. The Precisionists of the 1920s and '30s, Charles Sheeler chief among them, painted American industry with a clarity so total it curdled into something faintly surreal, faintly ominous, without ever needing a slogan. Berenice Abbott's photographs of New York in the 1930s did something similar as documentary, a record of a city becoming something else, made urgent by the specificity of what was actually there. Rich's paintings work in that same register: not protest, but witness. A record of what this particular moment in this particular city looked like, made by someone obsessive enough to get every window right.
The process itself is inseparable from that idea of record-keeping. For the first time, every source photograph in this body of work is Rich's own, a departure from the appropriated, Internet-sourced imagery of his earlier paintings, and a small but deliberate act of authorship over what's being witnessed. From there the image is put through a process that traces back to his training in printmaking, screen printing and intaglio specifically, and that has only gotten more exacting over time. In his own words:
“My painting process developed from my background in printmaking—specifically screen printing and intaglio. A painting begins with a sourced image or a photograph I take in response to my research. The source image is manipulated and scaled in Photoshop, printed out to the size I envision the painting to be, and then traced and redrawn on an aluminum composite panel covered with a translucent vinyl mask. The resulting line drawing is cut out by hand using an X-Acto and colors are mixed in reference to the source image using Golden fluid acrylic paints and mediums. The image is then transcribed into paint employing a multi-layered masking and stenciling process that involves the meticulous cutting out of shapes and the application of paint with a squeegee.”
It amounts, as Rich puts it, to an elaborate paint-by-numbers, except that the numbers are his own invention, assigned color by color to a photograph that has already been pushed through Photoshop into something looking only partway like what his eye actually saw. The labor is enormous and largely invisible in the finished painting: hundreds of hand-cut stencils, layered one over another, each one masking what came before so the next color can go down clean. What survives that process isn't documentary in any straightforward sense. It's a photograph that has been taken apart, recolored, and rebuilt into something adjacent to reality rather than a copy of it,his word for it is “edited,” which feels right. The buildings are real. The version of them on the panel is not quite the world as it is, but the world as it's been strained through one very particular, very deliberate set of decisions, over and over, thousands of times, until a painting exists.
New York holds a specific place in all of this, distinct from the other cities and structures that have run through Rich's work over the years. He lived there for a long time before Berlin, and before North Carolina, and he still thinks of it as something closer to a portal than a place — the city that has absorbed generation after generation of people arriving to start over, his own family's history included. It is also, he's noticed, a city that seals its residents into their own version of the world: live in Manhattan long enough and the rest of the country starts to feel like a separate track entirely; live in Brooklyn, and Midtown itself can start to feel like another universe, twenty minutes and a bridge away. That tension, the center of the world, and also just one more sealed-off enclave among many, running on its own logic while everything else runs on another, is its own quiet echo of the parallel-universe feeling that shapes the whole body of work, magnified to the scale of the city that, more than any other, gets to decide what counts as the world.
There's something almost narrative in how Rich has come to describe this group of paintings. Not a story exactly, but glimpses of one: someone arriving, someone starting over, someone leaving things behind the way the writers he's been listening to leave things behind in their books, whether the record is fictionalized or not. He's said he doesn't fully know yet what this show adds up to, and that he may not know for years—that the connecting of the dots, this time, happened late, almost by accident, sometime after most of the paintings already existed. What he does seem certain of is the moment he's recording: an in-between stage, uncertain of where it's headed, in which the built world goes on looking as permanent and unbothered as ever, indifferent to whatever is or isn't being done about the forces bearing down on it. The paintings don't resolve that tension. They just hold it very still, in very exact light, for as long as you're willing to look.
Essay by Evan Pricco
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