He moved to New York City in 2000 and spent several years making text-based drawings and penning Calvinoesque poems and essays, which he sometimes published pseudonymously in ads in Zing magazine. Experiments in electronic music soon followed with bandHurray, a quartet that included Peter Mandradjieff, Zak Prekop, and Josh Brand. Aldrich often works on gessoed panels with a mixture of oil paint, mineral spirits, and wax, which he lays on with a brush or palette knife. The combination of the resistant ground and viscid alloy registers his short hesitant strokes with tender congealed precision. His breezier canvases have been compared to Philip Guston's transitional pictures from the mid-1960s. Although mostly abstract and casual, Aldrich's paintings also betray a distinctly literary sensibility, even as he targets what he has called the essential "unwordliness of experience." Snippets of text and random words-UFO, the numeral 4-appear as decals or pencil scrawls, while lines incised with the back of a brush suggest writing once removed. Taciturn pictures carry evocative and ungainly verbal appendages in the form of elliptical press releases or titles like Large Obsessed with Hector Guimard, 2008, a nod to the architect of Paris's Art Nouveaumetro stations, or If I Paint CrownedI've Had It, Got Me, 2008, a telling paraphrase of Cézanne explaining he would be ruined if he tried to paint the "crowned" effect of a still life rather than the thing itself. Aldrich’s work proceeds from the assumption that aesthetic experience is no longer localized in any self-sufficient surface or material. His inquisitive approach to his paintings extends both to the way they come to occupy a space and to the space from which they come. His work does not depict the life of the studio but embodies it directly, reconstituting the books, postcards, records, and junk he happens to have lying around. A failed attempt at a jury-rigged curtain or a page of poetry might wind up on a canvas, while a collaged element might get ripped off, leaving behind a frayed paper scar. Aldrich is unconcerned with creating a dominant or domineering pictorial style. In Aldrich's hands, all the cutting, stretching, and collaging are not so much operations or strategies or ends unto themselves. Rather, they are yet more tools in the resourceful painter's arsenal, just like the different kinds of paint he uses, and the instruments with which he applies them, and the gunk he mixes in. Aldrich's paintings wear their disfigurement easily, without a feeling of brainy exposition or true bodily harm. Their sense of humble panache lies precisely in the way aggressive acts can cohabit with milder ones while still retaining a lively renegade charge. Indeed, Aldrich's most radical proposition may be his commitment to nudging painting forward via a combination of inquisitive tinkering and truculent gestures that would otherwise have left it undone. This does not make for an ahistorical, reactionary enterprise or for an unsophisticated one. If anything, his paintings abrade the false dichotomy between innocence and understanding. The possibilities for painting lie all around us, he suggests; the trick is knowing how to frame the choice.
