Xavia Duke Richards: Beyond the Senses

In Beyond the Senses,  Xavia Duke Richards interrogates freedom from oppression as both physical and immaterial, intimate and universal. Some paintings spill and bulge beyond their frames; others are contained by strips of hessian burlap; others, still, have been hacked and clawed at revealing a glimpse of the layers of earthy pigments below the surface. Shifting between all-over abstraction and a schematic architectural abstraction, Richards’ paintings offer a material salve to the oppositional binary of freedom and confinement. Although the paint application appears dense and heavy, these paintings manage somehow to exude an ethereal levity that is both surprising and compelling.