Charles Rea

Charles Rea is a Vancouver-based artist who has been exhibiting for a decade. He is an important participant in Vancouver's painting community, and has exhibited in Vancouver; Toronto; Montreal; Cologne; Hamburg; and Toyama, Japan.

Both books and architecture have played a major role in Rea's painting. The work exhibited in the 1985 Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition, Young Romantics, had actual books incorporated as the ground for his paintings of architectural interiors. Charles Rea's new work has painted images of books stacked into formations that suggest architectural structures. Presented on flat grounds of solid colour, the images of books are thickly painted and allude to the long-standing rift between minimalist abstract painting and figurative representation.

Charles Rea is interested in creating a delicate balance between a visual reading of the painting's materiality and a subliminal reading of each book's content. The titles of the books are legible and create a web of textual readings across the canvas. The use of text is a common device in contemporary art and Charles Rea is finding complex and humorous ways of incorporating words into paintings.