Drake’s Editorial: Abstract Painting With Reginald Sylvester II
Drake’s Editorial: Abstract Painting With Reginald Sylvester II
ARTIST NEWS
8 July, 2026
‘I’m at Maximillian William gallery on Mortimer Street, London, stood in front of Reginald Sylvester II’s painting Cup of Water the Colour of Fire, and I’m trying to work out how it is doing so much at once. As his canvas, Reginald has stretched an olive, army surplus shelter-half, creased along the folds it was issued in, over black rubber.
A shelter-half is one half of a tent. A soldier carries his half and his poles, meets another man carrying the other, and the two parts button together into somewhere to sleep. Reginald has hung the incomplete thing on the wall and let it keep the dampened mood of salvage. Over the top, the colour goes up like a flare. A bloom of orange and crimson breaks open, spread wide across the olive, the way it might if Pollock or de Kooning had got to it, wide-eyed and probably drunk, or the way a paint factory might look the instant it goes up, every barrel split open, red sheeting down the walls and pooling on the floor.’
– Matthew Holman
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