An echo is a reflected sound wave. An avalanche is a mass of snow, ice, and rocks falling rapidly down a mountainside. Reflecting the exhibitions lower Alpine location and its title, Echo Avalanche is Alan Reid’s synthesis of visual form with, musical impulses, filmic dramaturgy, and literary verse. He mellifluously conveys simultaneity of image, concrete text, abstract, and Modernist geometric forms. Reid’s femme fatales are a projection of appearances with the soothing rhythm of Stéphane Mallarmé’s “roll of the dice”, and the divergent registers of high and low diction found in Apollinaire’s Alcools.
Staccato musical notes, names of canonized composers, floating vowels and letters of the English alphabet appear. Their consonant sounds stimulate the spatial relationships of figure to ground, ground to geometric overlay and cognitive perception. Clues to his influences are playfully encoded; the clarity and line of Poussin, late Cezanne, the erotic portraits of Pierre Klossowski, Bataille’s ‘Story of the Eye’, J.S. Bach.
Alan Reid’s women are a syncopation of its many stylistics parts, and a projection of the perfect attributions that give rise to the expression of anima.
