The art of Richar Tuttle

The idea of an art providing a direct experience of reality, as opposed to a secondary, representational one, is one of modernism's most powerful enduring aspirations. Postmodern criticality has held this old-fashioned and indeed impossible ideal under suspicion, particularly since the 1970's and 1980's. What gives Tuttle's efforts in this arena their sense of legitimacy is the fact that his approach keeps well in check the regressive bluster and forceful assertions of absolute certainties that have traditionally accompanied such undertakings. In his quest to figure out "how to maintain the achievements of modernism, particularly in a world dead to them", Tuttle recovers modernism's best qualities in a subversive, deliberately non-general, and imperfect sublime. Not for Tuttle the creation of a single, unadulterated, and absolute "truth"; instead each piece constitutes a palpable, believable, seemingly inevitable "little truth", a graceful and fearless aesthetic presence in front of which one envounters not a depicted image but the thing itself. The artist is "after essences', certainly; "not streamlined Platonic ones", however, "but informal, folded, asymmetrical, lumpy, hairy little entelechies." This universe of small truths addresses the viewer on the spot in a continually constructed present that helps us to feel what it si to be."