All images courtesy of Ochi Projects, Los Angeles.
Rives Granade sounds strikingly similar to Rio Grande, a river in the Southwest. Rives Granade is an artist from the opposite side of the South, however — Mobile, Alabama, in the Southeastern United States, to be exact. I could hear a slight tinge in his voice — a Southern drawl — and that’s when I knew we were going to have a nice conversation that wouldn’t be located anywhere near a river.
Granade’s recent solo exhibition Red Poem at Ochi Projects (closed December 19, 2015) in Los Angeles highlighted his new series of paintings and sculpture that left me wondering about the ways one can create the illusion of space within a two-dimensional canvas, while also examining the space between language and poetry.
The red that Granade uses in these paintings seems as bright as the red one might find on a new car, its contours painted over, curved, becoming in the bright sunlight of a Los Angeles freeway. On the other hand, the textual element of Granade’s paintings seems to reference graffiti, or some sort of DIY poetics. This all factors back into Granade’s philosophies about making art, creating space, and defining color.
“A lot of works in Red Poem were about finding middle ground between language, architecture and sculpture, that space where it is just a painting, but it touches on all of these things,” says Granade. “I will say that the starting point for this work was just reading poetry, and I’ve been writing a little bit of poetry in the last year or two, and I’ve got a poetry book that will come out in February 2016.”
Born and raised in the Deep South, Granade took his time to arrive in an art career but knew from an early age that art was his passion. He grew up in Mobile, Alabama, but he wasn’t surrounded by art in the way that someone living in or near a big city would be.
Granade says he was always nuts about drawing, but his only exposure to visual art was through comic books and magazines. The culture of Alabama is very hunting and fishing-oriented, but Rives and his friends got into skateboarding as well, which led to more comic books.
During his undergraduate at Washington and Lee University, a college located in the town of Lexington, Virginia, that both his father and grandfather attended, he ended up studying philosophy. While there, he recalls an enchanting experience with Cy Twombly, who happened to live in the same town. (Sally Mann lived there as well.)
“My professor in the philosophy department was best friends with Cy, so he took me out, we went to lunch, we went to these hot springs,” says Granade. “He had an entourage of younger men who would drive him around. I knew who he was but never made the connection until later.”
Though his advisor encouraged him to think about art, and he took classes in aesthetics, it wasn’t really until after college that things changed. A trip to the Pompidou Center in Paris broadened his art horizons, and it was around that time that he realized his art path. It wasn’t until he was interviewing at the University of Texas’ law school, where his mother received her law degree, that he realized this wasn’t the right career for him.
“I was at this law school, and I was reading this terribly boring brief and thinking god I don’t want to read this, I don’t want this to be my life,” says Granade. “I walked away from that interview and decided I didn’t want to be a lawyer, and from that point on I decided to more or less be an artist.”
He went on to do his MFA at San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), working with Trisha Donnelly, and then moved to LA in 2010. In graduate school, he began working with CAD, which he is still currently using to create the necessary space in his paintings.
“Most works in the show were done in Illustrator,” says Granade. “I was doing some drawings and other more advanced programs, and they just looked too real — I really like the artifice that is created, the artificial light that is created in the old school programs, like the basic SketchUp: 3D for Everyone or Blender.”
In addition to his recent show at Ochi, Granade has held solo exhibitions at Duncan Miller Project Space in Santa Monica, Marine Contemporary Salon in Venice, and Steven Wolf Fine Arts in San Francisco, along with a healthy number of group shows around the U.S., as well as international shows in Tokyo, Athens, and Norway. No matter where he is showing his spacially charged works, however, the constant poeticism and wonder about space remains relevant.
Says Granade, “A lot of it for me is creating these strange objects that are artificial but also refer to language.”
