Boundless Abandon: Recent Paintings by Peter Reginato by Alex Grimley

I’ve been visiting Peter Reginato’s studio a few times a year for the past several years. Each time I arrive, he has a painting or two in progress, a handful of new works still drying on the floor, and a couple of canvases I saw on my last visit now stretched and hanging on the wall. Navigating the paint cans and containers on the studio floor—he works on unstretched canvases tacked to the floor—we walk over to the newest paintings. Speaking fluently about his art, Reginato will point to a detail in one of the paintings and tell me how he wanted to take that bit further, expand upon it, try it out and see what happens. Reginato works from intuition, each work building upon the last like a painterly stream of consciousness. The language of his art is bold, exuberant color, dynamic drawing, and an overall visual intensity that makes his paintings appear new and vibrant to the eye with each viewing.   

Reginato studied at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1960s and had his first solo show of paintings (and a couple sculptures) at the Open Theatre Gallery in Berkeley in 1966. He continued working in three dimensions, becoming an accomplished sculptor, exhibiting for over five decades, with works in public collections throughout the United States, when he returned to painting. As was the case with the development of his sculpture, which, from its relative austere origins, flowered into a colorful, whimsical, and totally original style, Reginato’s painting has become steadily more distinctive as it’s evolved. In retrospect, his shift from sculpture to painting feels less like a definitive break and more like a natural evolution—a continuation of his sculptural language by other means. The essential elements of Reginato’s painting—colored planes, organic shapes, and complex linear drawing—were already present in the sculpture. The continuity between Reginato’s three- and two-dimensional work is evident not only in formal qualities such as his distinct color palette and the prominent role of drawing in both mediums, but also in the similar visual and tactile sensations they afford.  

A characteristic painting by Peter Reginato is vibrantly colored, often featuring several sharply clashing color chords. For example, an array of dark valued ultramarine blues, burgundies, and deep violets, all of them close to black, may abut a range of pale, pastel tones like lilac, periwinkle, and seafoam green, which in turn border a set of bold yellows, oranges, ochres, and reds keyed to a blistering temperature. Despite the stark contrast between these color chords, the hues within each chord are closely valued—that is, each chord is internally harmonious, featuring colors of similar saturation, lightness or darkness, and intensity. The overall effect of Reginato’s complex palette may seem at times brash and audacious, but such a reaction is, I believe, indicative of his daring originality and ambition as a colorist. His sensitivity to color extends to the surface sheen of the commercial enamel paints he generally uses. For example, differences between areas of matte and gloss finish not only amplify coloristic contrasts, but read as varying degrees of tactile density. 

Shapes and forms from Reginato’s three-dimensional work appear virtually at the outset, as in his earliest 2010s paintings, where, among broad zones of formless color blended in pools and puddles, one finds the brightly-toned ovals and squiggling lines characteristic of his preceding sculptures. For several years, the drawn elements in his paintings were almost incidental to their larger and more prominent fields of color; but in a magisterial series of large horizontal paintings he began in the Spring of 2022, drawing took on a new primacy. Reginato started this series of paintings, among them After California and Yin and Yang (both 2022), by laying down broad pillars of color that span the height of the canvas. Upon this trellis-like structure, he began to draw (or, more specifically, to pour thin skeins of paint onto the surface from tins and containers). Swooping ellipses—similar in shape to the smooth and waxy leaves of the rubber plant he keeps in his studio—hang from looping stems and scrawls that climb the background columns like a vine. Some of these loops are colored in, others are left open to reveal contrasting colors underneath. What in many paintings would read as areas of positive and negative space feel, in these paintings, rather like areas of density and mass contrasted with areas of weightlessness and transparency. Rather like a sculpture in its environment, the visual sensations afforded by these paintings impress themselves in tactile and material terms. 

Reginato often fills the space between the organic forms in his paintings with colored hatching (he calls them “ribs”), as in Helena and Green Card (both 2023), and many canvases are subsequently finished with allover spatters of pointillistic dots, like Romance of Radium (2023). These two essential elements—biomorphic forms and decorative embellishment—reflect the two styles that his work builds upon: Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. Though he matured as an artist in the early 1970s, a period that saw the emergence of the “second generation” Color Field painters, including his friends and colleagues Ronnie Landfield, Dan Christensen, and Ron Davis, Reginato’s belated turn to painting in the 2010s allowed him to internalize their innovations and look for inspiration further back into the history of art. 

Thus, the biomorphic forms in Reginato’s work resemble those found in the paintings of Joan Miró and especially Arshile Gorky. In the emphatically vertical structure of After California and later paintings from 2022, one can sense echoes of Matisse’s 1917 Bathers by the River, while the dense linear tangle and overlay of spattered dots in Blue Bay (2024) recall the great 1950 Pollocks, like the Museum of Modern Art’s One: Number 31, 1950. In conversation, Reginato speaks highly of Fernand Léger’s 1912-1914 Contrast of Forms series, and the dual importance of Matisse and Jackson Pollock to his recent work. But none of these comparisons—the artist’s or my own—are intended to provide a chain of direct influence. On the contrary, Reginato has freely and imaginatively synthesized aspects from all of these artists, creating in the process an art of vibrancy and vitality entirely his own. 

I must admit, I’m perpetually lagging behind the pace of Peter’s advancement; it takes me some time to catch up to his vision. No sooner do I begin to understand the previous season’s work than I’m confronted with a confounding new departure. For example, recent works like A New Shade of Blue, completed in December 2024, are denser with painterly incident and more shockingly colored than anything he’s done before. The feverish intensity of this painting remains imprinted in my mind’s eye, a testament to the sense of freedom and abandon with which he approaches his art. Reginato works tirelessly, drawing daily, filling sketch pads with ideas of potential paintings, persistently exploring the possibilities inherent in his work, which, given the startling variety of paintings in this exhibition, seem boundless. The spirit that pervades the paintings in this exhibition mirrors that of Reginato’s artistic practice: vital, optimistic, imbued with the joy of discovery.