Works by Rick Klauber are assembled from wedge-shaped wooden shims about 16 inches long and anywhere from two to ten inches in width. If the flat plane of the canvas itself is part of the project of painting since Modernism, Klauber changes the game by using a surface that incorporates elements of abstraction in its essence, its unevenness, texture, interstices, accidents. By playing with colors and arrangements, Klauber reimagines the surface not as the pure Euclidian plane of the canvas but the sculptural, non-Euclidian universe of the shims. As if building a new formal language from the ground up, he begins with shims painted a single color, resulting in a sunken matte finish. The solid color shims relate to each other through their surfaces and juxtaposition of colors, like a single "pixelated" artwork. In other pieces, he begins to draw on the surfaces [of the] shims, and in still other works, the surface composition escapes even the bounds of the shim "frame."

The final formal element in Klauber's grammar is interruption. The spaces between the shims organize the solid colored pieces and disorganize the drawn-upon ones, fracturing the renderings on their surface, breaking them up denying them coherence, even redrawing them, creating a dialogue between sculpture and line that becomes increasingly tense. In the work Regular Laugh Riot, he seems to revel in the infinite possibilities of his project, allowing the spaces between the shims themselves to take over as they are juxtaposed at capricious, seemingly carefree, angles. Klauber's long mastery of the idiom of abstraction gives him the fluency and apparent ease to work in this infinitely reflecting funhouse mirror of formal possibilities: drawing reflecting on painting reflecting on sculpture back to drawing.

Cassandra Neyenesch

On the occasion of the exhibition “Summer Invitational”, curated by Miles Manning, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, 2014