I didn’t plan to review this show, but Dickie Landry’s quietly monumental paintings got stuck in my mind’s eye on repeat. A Louisiana native, Landry is a world-renowned saxophonist in the minimalist canon, visual artist, photographer, and an advocate for and collaborator with our state’s regional music scenes. This self-titled exhibition at Other Plans gallery in New Orleans follows Landry’s recent distinction as Humanist of the Year by Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. This past spring, Landry could be seen in the archival materials that accompanied the exhibition for his wife and collaborator Tina Girouard (1946-2020) in Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. The Dickie Landry exhibition at Other Plans is his first local showing since 1985 and includes 14 paintings from 2002 to 2023 ranging in size from the intimate Black Border Series, The Power of Gold (2023) at 16” x 20” to Red Slit (2008) at 78” x 110”. These are mostly acrylic on canvas, with a bit of oil stick and flashe paint. His diminutive barbed wire series, Mr. Lester’s Legacy, is also on view. The paintings are geometric in nature, and four large paintings integrate reprints of his archival photographs from his chronicles of the New York City art and music scenes from the late 1960s-on. The ever-present motif is an elongated hexagon that appears to float upon alternately black or white rectangular canvas backgrounds.
Taking a cue from minimalist musical composition which champions repetition, this perpetual form can be understood as the pulse of the overall visual composition of the show. Like the phenomenon of retinal memory after looking intently at a light, Landry’s hexagons appear to levitate on the canvas plane on fields of white or black paint. Facets and linear negative space of the canvases invoke walls and beams. Bell Bottom (2002), has the mood and shadow of a chapel, and I want to imagine a young Dickie Landry singing Gregorian chants inside of the cool, dark space of that painting. In the surprisingly three-dimensional acrylic on canvas Black Border Series, Broken Lines (2023), lines read like ruptures, conjuring friend Gordon Matta-Clark’s monumental sculptural sliced-through areas of buildings known as “cuttings.” Landry’s color palette also invokes elements of old houses and the labor that goes into construction, as seen in the palette of workwear greens, plumbing pipes silver and copper, spackle pinks, asbestos floor tile gray, and denim blues. Black Square Tumbling (2023) upends perspective, or perhaps the viewer must wait to catch up to the logic of a tilted Earth. Then, the palette shifts to silver-grays of older cameras, and the hexagon becomes a minimalist stage in paintings with Landry’s large black and white archival photos of artists. In the tryptic icon portrait of William Burroughs, One Smile, William Burroughs (1973/2023), the sitter does smile, but the 1973/2023 portrait of his collaborator Philip Glass, captured as a pensive Caravaggio in faceted silvers and grays, steals his thunder.