Don’t Take Them At Their Word: The New “Hyperspace” Exhibit at the MCA

MCA’s new Summer 2019 exhibit gave a promise and delivered an alternative. Its name is misleading, but given time, beneath it there is a value all of its own. Though his paintings have little to do with Hyperspace, Richert’s topics are important and crucial to our time. Rather than hyperspace, his subject is mostly of multiple aesthetics and inter-dimensional translations with a bored, contemplative attitude towards it all.

Richert’s innovation in his paintings is the introduction of the painting “key”. To maps, keys are crucial to understanding. They unlock the map. Items found on a map’s key are things like units to measure distance and coordinate directions- North, South, East, West. With a key, the map asserts its role to its reader to give direction.

For Richert, his paintings include a different key. Paintings are often left up to a viewer's interpretation, and this one still is, but because there is a key, the painter has designed the interaction, and, with the key, the painting asserts its purpose upon the viewer.

Richert’s key defines features of different aesthetics. There are broad categories and more specific, color-coded categories.

His key points out a set of aesthetic traits. Hunting for them becomes more abstract than a “Where’s Waldo” or an “I Spy” book. With this key, the painting itself becomes a map to move between different interacting aesthetics. Where in the painting do you find abstract construction? Where do you find figures?

With the key, the painting becomes a journey and the viewer goes on a journey between various aesthetic features. While paintings used to embody one aesthetic unique and untouchable by a viewer, Richert’s painting let’s aesthetics intertwine on the same canvas. While his portraiture and painting itself doesn’t illustrate multiple aesthetics in one piece, his key makes his painting as such.

Richert’s paintings depict options. His paintings give the viewer an ability to choose the aesthetic for the object they wish to see. This is suiting for a guy who also currently holds a position as a professor at the Rocky Mountain School of Art and Design.

While the gallery’s title is catchy, Richert’s work is important for another reason, just as important to human existence, and that is the human’s ability to create and move through objects with aesthetic variation.