Marcus Reichert

Marcus Reichert
Marcus Reichert in his studio, photograph by Edward Rozzo
Born	(1948-06-19) June 19, 1948 (age 69) Bayshore, New York
Nationality	American
Known for	Painter, Poet, Film-maker

Marcus Reichert (born June 19, 1948) is an American painter, poet, author, photographer, and film writer/director.

He was given his first exhibition of paintings at the age of twenty-one at the Gotham Book Mart and Art Gallery, New York,. In 1990, he was honored with a retrospective organised by the Hatton Gallery of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne which toured in various forms to Glasgow, London, Paris, and the United States. His Crucifixion paintings have been described by Richard Harries, the Bishop of Oxford, as being among the most disturbing painted in the 20th Century, while the American critic Donald Kuspit has written that both Picasso's and Bacon's pale in comparison. Reichert's neo-noir film Union City, which premiered at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival, was described by Lawrence O'Toole, film critic for Time magazine, as "an unqualified masterpiece."Union City is held in the Film Archive of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and his complete film works and his poetry and prose comprise the Marcus Reichert Archive at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

From 'Mirages, Transformations, Miracles: Marcus Reichert’s Paintings' by Donald Kuspit

Figure or object, face or flower, body or vase, Marcus Reichert’s images seem to exist somewhere in the limbo between hallucination and perception. In a hallucination, there’s no external object to be observed, however much something seems sensed and present; in a perception, there is such an object, experienced as a “hard fact,” indisputably separate from oneself. There are two kinds of hallucination, the French psychiatrist Jules Baillarger tells us, one psychosensorial, involving the combined action of the imagination and some sense organ, the other psychic, entirely a product of the imagination, with no sensory stimulus. Reichert’s hallucinations are of the first kind: his eye is stimulated by the perception of some object external to him, which is then imaginatively transformed into a painted image, producing what Baudelaire famously called a “sensation of the new,” the sort of sensation, as he also said, that a child might have when it saw something for the first time, spontaneously and without preconceptions. The resulting lived experience, as some philosophers would call it, or existential encounter, as others call it, seems miraculous—a sort of miraculous revelation, in which the thing intensely lived seems fresh and wonderful, because one has invested one’s own freshness and wonder in it. It is this sense of hallucinatory freshness, combined with a sense that the marvelous is always convulsive, as Breton wrote at the end of Nadja, his account of his relations with a madwoman he met, that we experience in Reichert’s paintings. Some are colorful and bright—startlingly luminous, for example in Orange Blossoms, 2008, with its dazzling sky-blue field; others somewhat dark and morbid, which many of the vessel paintings are. The vessel contains the “spirits of the dead,” Reichert writes, suggesting that it is an urn, even when it contains flame-like flowers, suggesting that the dead may be powerful geniis ready to escape from it, bringing life with them. Death and resurrection seem a subtheme of Reichert’s art, adding to their imaginative aura. The imaginative unconscious, which re-conceives one’s perceptions according to “the deepest laws of the soul,” to allude to Baudelaire’s classical definition, is clearly hyperactive in Reichert’s art...