Judit Reigl - "My latest paintings": December 17th, 1975

It deals essentially with real space, the thickness, the physical depth of a blank canvas, very thin, with no finish.
It also deals with real, physical motion, set in the space-time continuum: I walk alongside the canvas, skimming the surface with a paintbrush dipped in glycerophtalic paint. This paint marks the canvas laterally and, at the same times, seeps through it transversally. It is volume in progress, visible from the front as well as the back.

Next, it is a matter of the slow revelation of the passage from the imperceptible to the visible of this volume through a long pictorial work, more and more complex, precise, tight. Application of colour to the back of the canvas in layer after layer; as it deepens the supposedly empty spaces (those without any inscription), it paradoxically entails the slow disappearance of the volume, pushing it into the heart of the cloth, emptying it of vibration, flattening it to the point of near-dissolution.

Sometimes I stop at the first phase, that is to say, the exploration of the possibilities offered by the acrylic layers built up on just the front of the canvas. Sometimes, I continue this operation on the reverse of the canvas, underlining, insisting on the second phase: burying-dissolution.
But most of the time, I combine the two processes, on the back as well as on the front, finding an unstable and precarious balance on the threshold of of appearance/disappearance, at the boundary between birth of death.

I need two lives.