Various Small Fires is pleased to introduce a new collection of paintings by Milwaukee-based artist John Riepenhoff. Scene Painters’ Almanac is Riepenhoff’s first solo exhibition in Texas and presents the culmination of recent painting sessions that began en plein air.

Riepenhoff is the co-founder and director of The Green Gallery in his hometown of Milwaukee. The gallery operates as a site for community engagement through hosting contemporary art exhibitions, performances, screenings, gatherings around beer and food, and more. In addition to these operations, Riepenhoff maintains a studio practice. In recent years this entails painting in the night hours, often while away from home. The paintings in this series began as single-session undertakings, capturing gestural impressions of the night sky around the world. They have evolved to multi-evening endeavors that fixate on the Midwestern sky outside of his studio.

Riepenhoff produced the works in Scene Painters’ Almanac between the summer and early winter of 2022. Oil paint allows for rich layering and nuanced depth as up to a week’s worth of nights are captured on a given painting. Bright pinks, yellows, and oranges form the underpaintings of canvases that present various shades of blue. The long days of summer give way to the long nights of winter, reflected in the transition from soft pastels to deep midnight hues. Throughout, Riepenhoff’s range of mark making produces picture planes that construct a nuance equal to his subject while not necessarily being representative of it. One exception is found in Place (2022), which captures a roaring fireplace in a nod to a primeval hearth, a source of light and warmth more proximate than the celestial subject of these painting sessions.

The series has roots in the Naturalism of the nineteenth century and embraces the styles of Impressionism. The presence of the painter recedes into the complexity of nature, the depth of night expelling the ego.  Like the light from space that takes millenia to reach one’s eye, these works slowly reveal themselves as traces of temporal history. 

1511 Commerce Street, Dallas, Texas 75201

www.vsf.la/ / info@vsf.la / Tuesday - Saturday 10AM - 6PM

Like many of us over the past few years, John Riepenhoff curtailed his wanderings to spend more nights standing still. This was an especially peculiar condition for an artist whose practice is rooted in complex social networks and in creating opportunities for disparate communities to overlap. Broadly, his work has been committed to the collaborative. Through the production, preparation and consumption of food and beer, hand-built ovens and outdoor grills sited for community use, as well as organizing of contemporary art exhibitions, screenings and performances in his Green Gallery spaces, Riepenhoff is a multi-directional conduit for his beloved hometown of Milwaukee continuously importing and exporting cultural production of his own and by others.

As an ongoing component of this production, the artist has simultaneously maintained a more conventional studio practice focused on painting and ceramic sculpture. The Skies paintings originate in an ongoing series of plein air works initially conceived as direct, earnest impressions of the night sky. Made outdoors under impairment of the dark, cold and often awkward conditions on a rooftop, a beach or a frozen field, the paintings have evolved into a more durational, meditative investigation of place and the act of painting. Earlier works in this series were made swiftly in a single midnight frenzy, as a record of a peripatetic existence and befitting the artist’s hunger for the unknown. They were painted in far-flung locales from Scotland to Japan to remote areas of Northern Wisconsin. The new paintings, by contrast, are notably more fastidiously worked and reflect a newfound stasis. They are intensified by the hybrid impressions of multiple nights outside in Milwaukee’s light-filled urban density. The result is a group of complexly layered compositions of limited palette and expansive imagination. Dense clusters of repeated marks—dots, orbs, staccato stripes—occupy the center of the works and fan out to the perimeter of the linen like haloed frames or a screenspace that demarcates the eye’s limitation in apprehending a vast and variable emptiness.

Fittingly, the two sculptures, hand-built from coil-constructed ceramic and splashed with glaze, depict owls. Called Decoys, these silent unseen denizens of the night sky watch over the exhibition mirroring the artist and viewer’s gaze conjuring the inky conditions of the work’s creation. As a perceptual device, the Decoys emphatically remind us that the paintings are something more complicated than pure abstraction and invite us to transcend our familiar vantage.

BROADWAY / 373 Broadway New York, NY 10013

broadwaygallery.nyc / info@broadwaygallery.nyc / Tuesday-Saturday 11-6pm

When chance finds you at an unknown crossroad you begin to hesitate. You do not know which direction to go. In such moment if you have adequate faculty of intuition and observation, cues from the environment can guide you to the right decision and lead to safety.

The condition of our contemporary world somehow seems to stand at this crossroad of being disoriented- as if you understand that it’s impossible to bring back life’s old familiarity nor can you clearly envision a stable future.

In search of alternative choices probably many ideas are elaborated in force majeure by mankind’s overheated mind, but as always cultural and artistic phenomenon comes forward in ‘avant-guard’ and tries in advance to show us ‘ephemeral’ abilities of transformation.

John Riepenhoff is an artist from Milwaukee, who has recently returned his gaze up to the sky. For a while he had established himself as a painter of the night sky, but similar to Ivan Aivazovsky who overcame banal cliché of being a just marine painter, he began to search for artistic observatories on earth in order to better see worlds beyond the sky.

Artist Mamuka Japharidze runs a residency in Shindisi village near to Tbilisi in Georgia. He often invites artists from Georgia and abroad to have creative collaborations. It is worth considering the context of this residency because Mamuka Japharidze’s art is situated in the phenomenon of place. Local climate, landscape features, elements of traditional life or history are some examples of materials which Japharidze uses to create environmentally friendly art. These products bear artistic value as well as practical functionalities such as nurturing food and drink.

Since Riepenhoff began to work at the residency his attention was drawn to the characteristic content of little details around the place. After helping with the rigorous process of crushing Chinuri grapes brought from the historical Samachablo region, which is located over the Russian occupied boarder-line, he quietly reflected on the details of the process while he doceumented the October night sky.  This same silence necessary for the fermentation of Chinuri grapes was present in his  minimal state for perception and processing.

In addition to winemaking, themes of Japharidze’s magnetic hearths influenced Riepenhoff’s creative process as well. As a result, Riepenhoff created six metaphorical portraits of Japaridze’s in small format paintings.

Theme of the sky or in other words John’s main subject of interest was perceived exactly through such ‘details’. Thus, ‘The Skies’ over Shindisi, Tbilisi or Kutaisi clearly gained characteristic accents of Chinuri or Shavkapito grape plants.

In parallel Japharidze was making preparations as well although in a different way. He was occupied mainly by activities of autumnal works, and the process of painting was handed over to external circumstances. The large scale wall work presented in this exhibition was formerly acted as a tabletop near to the tone wood-fired oven. The surface was built up over time with lime and cyanide paints covering the canvas, on which invisible traces of nature appeared day by day. Marks made by wind, rain, and sun were scattered all over the picture plain and like the depths of the sky revealed endless layers.

At the last stage of working process of American and Georgian painters, the artworks which have been created with an interaction with the nature of the countryside, gradually and harmoniously must transit to urban space and represent themselves in a gallery.

John Riepenhoff and Mamuka Japharidze’s artistic collaboration will take place in the Gallery Artbeat located in the old town of Tbilisi and traditionally will touch on topics of place and its adoption. At this time their work will concentrate on the elegant granite-stone fire-place of this historic gallery.

‘Kera’ (hearth) is a universal place for daily activities and religious rituals across the cultural spectra. In this exhibition it represents functional space of peculiar portal, transitory or so called liminal phenomenon, where artists do not present their art works in a dominant way, but rather let the external circumstances lead, trying neatly to reveal mystical traces of nature and their creative process to viewers.  As a result of random occurrences, whenever you find yourself at an unknown crossroad you begin to hesitate. You do not know which direction to go. In such moment if you have adequate faculty of intuition and observation, environment itself can guide you to the right decision and lead to a safe place.