“It is just about perspectives and again, the idea of allowing things to exist in different ways in a kind of fluid continuum […] what is important is that things can and do exist in different places, and this doesn’t detract from either.” Richard Aldrich, 2009

Richard Aldrich’s paintings refute any one specific style, and indeed he has manipulated the medium of substrate on canvas in ways ranging from expressionist abstraction, to “emotionless” minimalism and even conceptual experiments with textual elements; yet, throughout this oeuvre runs a specificity and stylistic awareness that is purely his own. In iPod, Aldrich plays with the manner in which words painted on canvas can come to represent not merely their own lettering and formal architecture, but in their painterliness or pointedness, assume an objecthood which is denied their printed brethren. Hovering in the middle of the canvas, with their bobbling placement and painted imperfections, the three words “Flying UFO Flying” seem themselves to be hovering mid-flight. Aldrich’s words are neither the sign-maker perfect words of Ruscha or Baldessari, nor the literal conceptualism of Kienholz or LeWitt. This composition could not be misinterpreted as the gestural, worked white canvas of Ryman and yet, with his “slackerish cosmopolitanism,” sly intellectualism, and virtuousic talent manipulating his chosen media, Aldrich forges a contemporary practice and theory all his own, reflected most quintessentially in iPod.