Reginald Sylvester II's 'Until Then' at Maximillian William: Read the Room's Light First

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 19, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Reginald Sylvester II's 'Until Then' at Maximillian William: Read the Room's Light First At a Glance Cross-town — Reginald Sylvester II's new military-material paintings at Maximillian William are built from relief and saturated colour that a phone flattens and the wrong light buries, so this one only exists standing in the room. Walk into “Until Then” and the first thing that registers is not an image. It is a surface. Reginald Sylvester II stretches rubber over an aluminium panel, works a discarded military tent half into it, then lays saturated green and bright brushwork across the top. So before any picture resolves, the wall is giving you weight, ridge, and the dull nap of old shelter fabric, with colour sitting on it like growth over rubble. The show runs at Maximillian William on Mortimer Street, 4 June to 1 August. It is his fourth solo with the gallery. Why the light decides a Reginald Sylvester II painting Here is what a painter notices that a review of the imagery will skip. These works are all relief. The aluminium support is rigid and dead flat, so it gives the built surface nothing to hide behind, and the tent fabric, the rubber, and the loaded paint all read as physical topography. That makes the lighting the whole game. Aim a hard raking spotlight at a surface like this and the military material throws long shadows, the ridges turn into a relief map of themselves, and the saturated colour, which the artist clearly means as the antidote to all that heaviness, drowns under shadow theatre. These want flat, even, frontal light. The wrong light turns one of these paintings into a diorama of its own texture. The first thing to check standing in the room is the angle of the light, because the angle decides whether you are looking at a painting or at its topography. Relic or painting? The hang makes the call The second decision the room makes is whether these read as paintings or as war relics. The gallery puts the weight on the date: “Sylvester sources the material specifically from the 1960s and early 70s, a period of tumultuous political and social change in the US.” Material that loaded wants to become an artifact. Spotlit and isolated on a bare stretch of wall, the tent half starts standing for the history instead of holding the painting, and the green on top reads as decoration over a relic. Hung at eye level with breathing room and even light, the colour wins, which is the point. A work like Noa’s First , at 182.9 by 152.4 centimetres, is body scale, so it also needs enough wall to step back from before the colour-over-material resolves. In a room this size, that spacing is a real decision, not a given. Cross-town: why this show only exists in the room This is the kind of show that loses almost everything to a screen. The relief, the dull-versus-saturated contrast, the way the colour fights the material instead of decorating it, none of it survives a phone photo. The work has to be stood in front of