Blake Rayne

Campoli Presti is pleased to announce Blake Rayne's eight solo exhibition with the gallery.

A central figure in shaping current debates about painting, Rayne's places painting within a economy of signs, revealing the components of the pictorial language and the processes through which they are defined.

Rayne's last series of works relate to his interest in recording sequential streams of movement into painting, drawing a continuous wandering line throughout the picture plane. Rayne's lines shift between their uncontrolled direction and their geometrical determination, namely the frame.

In this new series of paintings, a white looping line is created by a steel banding stencil that travels around the edges of the canvas. The line is lightly dusted with colored layers of sprayed acrylic paint. The paperclips that initially held the banding together were released to allow for expansion into final shape of each of the line compositions.

The repeated use of stencil techniques in Rayne's practice reveals a script of image production through an operation that belongs to the applied arts. Other activities that conventionally belong to a painter's domain such as folding, spraying, stretching and rolling also form part of the catalogue of procedures that has allowed Rayne to reveal, mask and test painting's historical forms. 

Blake Rayne (b. 1969), lives and works in New York. Recent one-person exhibitions of Rayne’s work include Peaceful Photographers (Campoli Presti, London and Paris, 2015), Warmilk (Mendes Wood, São Paolo, 2014), On Fridays We Have Half Days (Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 2014), Blake Rayne (1301PE, 2013), Wild Country (Campoli Presti, London, 2012), Blake Rayne (Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, Miami Beach, 2011), Shade Subscription (Capitain Petzel Gallery, Berlin, 2011), Coastal Graphics (Sutton Lane, Paris, 2011), and Folder and Application (Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 2010). He has also been featured in group exhibitions such as PLIAGE/FOLD (Gagosian Gallery, London, 2014) Chat Jet: Painting <Beyond> the Medium (Künstlerhaus, Graz, 2013), System Analysis (Langen Foundation, Neuss, 2011) and New York to London and Back: The Medium of Contingency (Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 2011), as well as Bergen Kunsthall, The Kitchen, Sculpture Center, Artists Space, Reena Spaulings, Greene Naftali, and American Fine Arts. Rayne will have his first institutional solo exhibition at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas in October 2016. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Collection FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Portland Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.