RICCI ALBENDA | DIPYTCH

Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in April 2014

“There’s something… amiably nerdish, rule-driven experimental spirit to Ricci Albenda’s COLOR-I-ME-TRY ‘alphabetic colorization system,’ a mapping of the alphabet onto the natural spectrum that he has pursued [since the 1990s]…

[Albenda] argues with a straight face that the programmatic addition of color to type might constitute a genuine and useful enhancement of its associative power. It sounds like a faintly ludicrous position, but the autumnal ochres of wool hat or the rich purples of vaisya do seem to add something to the words’ meaning, and the very difficulty of defining what this might be is no small part of the works’ lasting appeal. In addition to playing with color, Albenda has also invested some time in a quest for the ideal font, arriving at Albenda Bold, a variation on Times Roman designed for maximum ease of reading and sufficiently flexible to allow for occasional small variations…

Painted text is now such a familiar form that to employ it without descending into snarky conceptual witticism or half-baked sociopolitical “statement” is a genuine achievement. Ironically, Albenda’s hyperrationalism succeeds in reminding us of the arbitrary, abstract beauty of words.”

(Michael Wilson, “Ricci Albenda”, Artforum, January 2005, Vol. 43, No. 5, p. 183)