Working intensely in a series of works done in five-year thematic intervals, Tony de los Reyes uses both technical and narrative techniques to underscore his philosophical, historical and cultural references. His evocative, allegorical paintings traverse the space(s) between the dualities of past and present, nature and culture, the real and the symbolic. Rather than illustrating an idea, the work functions as an aperture into the imaginary. The narrative comes from his fascination for many subjects: deep affection for history and the subtlety and dynamism of cultures, sailing, ships and water, trade and hypothetical political and/or historical situations. The how and what of his practice are always poetically and conceptually intertwined. He dips freely and frequently in a process that in itself reinforces this interplay and blurs the distinction between what is represented and the process by which it is made. To experience de los Reyes's work is one of those rare instances where there is a confluence of intellectual and aesthetic individuality, uniqueness and power, evident with a stand-alone work as well as an installation of his paintings, works on paper and sculpture, becoming more than the sum of their parts.

His first series of paintings, titled Rococo (after the Baroque/Rococo period of the 18th century), were made to resemble chinoiserie or delftware, from the Dutch town Delft, known for paintings that appropriated the look of blue and white Ming decoration from the early 17th century as harbingers of refinement and taste. De los Reyes' paintings share the blue and white palette and the meticulous elegance and precision of the copy of the original, but rather than painted with a brush, they are in fact oil alkyd dripped and poured into fluid forms (ala Jackson Pollock) on wood panels on the floor, with shiny surfaces that refer back to Chinese porcelain. Moving through the viscous surface with a wooden stylus, he creates spatial vistas that when viewed closely are abstracted, and from a distance appear as detailed imagery of ships at sea or bouquets of flowers. This duality of abstraction and representation symbolizes the commoditization of cultural style and how it is traded and appropriated from culture to culture.

The next body of work, starting in 2006, explores de los Reyes' interest in the sea and the ship as metaphor for the individual in society. He grew up in California, close to the Pacific, and spent a lot of time sailing. The Sea is the Ghost of the World is inspired by Solaris, a novel by Stanislaw Lem, and Tarkovskiy's movie -- in which the ocean is anthropomorphized as a character with intelligence and emotion --pigmented gesso and enamel were applied on raw canvas over panel in the most minimal of ways, with images of the sea emerging from beneath the surface, as if conjured up by the subconscious. The work began to find its place between the literal and metaphoric, materials and process used as a way to better understand the symbolic space of painting. And like the previous work, this painting navigates the territory, so to speak, between a European sensibility -- of embracing the past while forging into the new -- and in this new body of work, a reconsideration of two canonized American art movements, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, before they were commoditized as a symbol of American laissez-faireism and auratic character, respectively.

De los Reyes delved into Herman Melville's 1851 literary classic, Moby Dick, challenged by its experimental use of narrative construction (story within a story) and its permeating philosophy of dualism, while thinking of the parallels of "an invisible menace terrorizing a nation with President Bush and Bin Laden as Ahab and the whale." He spent the next five years creating a visual mythopoeia based on the novel -- a combination of ambiguity, irony, allusion, multiplicity and the conceptual employ of painterly technique -- that underscores the relevance of Moby Dick as a subject today and serves as a cause for introspection of our past and present tumultuous history. In an ongoing exploration of the use of "pure" materiality and minimalist color and the intuitive impulses of AbEx, the artist uses an economy of materials with a limited palette: raw linen, sumi ink (applied with water and oil and at times airbrushed), white and black pigments never mixed, and rode bister, a natural medium that when combined with water enables the play between translucency and opacity, and at times resembles blood or a turbulent sea, symbolically accenting the violent nature of the novel (and America's expansionism). The first works were seemingly abstract large-scale paintings of pearlescent white waves, as white as the enigmatic sperm whale and all that it symbolized for Melville; contrasted with small bister paintings with shocking blood-red splattered Rorschach test-like shapes containing large ships, as if swallowed in the ocean like Pequod by the dive of the whale.

De los Reyes' Moby Dick leitmotif grew, including more images of the whale ship Pequod, the heavily tattooed harpooner Queequeg and his shrunken heads, skulls for Ahab, bronze stars standing in for the crew, including the outcast Ishmael and Quaker Starbuck (yes, Starbucks Coffee is named for him), hemp rope, an early American export, and the "dart"(sailor's slang for the harpoon), a symbol of whaling, which at the time of the novel was one of America's most successful industries until whale oil was almost depleted. Strike (2010) has darts that are minimal sculptural objects made of bronze that violently pierce the walls of the gallery, and with terrifying beauty, overtake it with sheer force of will, as if a grand conquest.

The primary image in this body of work is that of the ocean, symbolizing FATE. In 1851 (2009) a reversed American flag has thirty-one stars -- the nation was still building and California had just become a state -- painted with "sea to shining sea" bleeding through, dark waves licking at the stripes. An earlier version evokes Jasper Johns White Flag painting with the use of encaustic, a meditation on the dialectic in Johns' art between revealing and concealing, and how it has become as iconic as its subject. Text from the novel is quoted in some of the paintings and works on paper, slightly obscured by exquisite close-up renderings of hemp rope, reminiscent of Eva Hesse's anti-illusionistic sculpture of the early 70s. By using Melville's words, "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method" the text now functions as a liberating prophecy.

—Carole Ann Klonarides