by Richard Speer, Visual Arts critic of the Willamette Week, Portland, OR

Sometimes the title says it all. Doughlas Remy calls one of his artworks Opulentia, a fanciful term that pretty well sums up the Seattle artist’s current opus. Take in Remy’s works from across a room and you see glittering stained-glass compositions, roughly symmetrical and often organized around a strong central motif. Approach them close up and you marvel at the minutiae of which they are made: watch bezels, seashells, shot glasses, light bulbs, gold chains, computer motherboards, bicycle reflectors. Sounds kitschy, right? Like some tacky-ass bric-à-brac you’d find at a garage sale or vintage shop? Trust me—it’s not. The work is surprising in ways difficult to convey with words. May the cliché police club and cuff me: You have to see it to believe it. Remy was a watercolorist, art historian and graphic designer before devoting himself exclusively to the French art of mixed-media assemblage. He painstakingly composes his pieces, dipping their components into epoxy resin at various depths, swirling pigments through the concoction, then waiting more than a day for the resin to cure. For all the heterogeneity of his materials, Remy does not group himself with the found-object crowd. Nor do these pieces give off the whimsical vibes you might expect. They evoke, rather, what the artist calls a “shrine-like” quality. Some compositions, with arched frames and multi-hued glass, recall rosary windows. Others, laden with gold leaf and inset with jewel-like beads, hark clearly to Byzantium. Is the artist reaching for some kind of cosmology? His Midnight in the Garden looks like the Big Bang, a giant marble in the middle, deep-purple oils radiating outward like nebulae, dozens of dominoes lining the work’s outer edges (perhaps God is playing dominoes with the universe?) But no, Remy maintains, he intends no meaning beyond sheer visual interest. “Sometimes,” he says, “interesting things happen on the surface.”

 Willamette Week, August 28, 2002.

Doughlas Remy’s mixed-media works lie somewhere on a continuum between assemblage and what might be called “two-dimensional sculpture.” Many of them incorporate the kinds of "pre-formed" elements not originally intended to serve as art materials. These include machine parts, objets trouvés, and various bric-à-brac that the artist skillfully fuses into an ensemble whose beauty and significance surpasses those of the sum of its constituent parts.

Whatever the balance between non-art and art materials in these works, they are invariably sculpturesque, not because one can place them in the center of a room and move around them, but because their surfaces are in heavy relief, with depths up to three inches. The almost “protean” quality of the works is due not just to Remy’s use of reflective and refractive materials, but also to the viewer’s changing angle of vision and the varying intensities and sources of light where the works are displayed. An errant ray of evening sunlight catching some part of one of these works can produce a magical moment.

And “magical” is what it is all about. There is always something magical about both the artist’s creative act and the viewer’s creative response to it. In assemblage, the alchemical overtones are very strong, for the artist creates value out of what may be perceived as worthless and transforms multiplicity into unity. Remy's works have often been described as "shrine-like" or "Fabergé-like." Their symmetry, composition and use of color are reminiscent of Byzantine and Renaissance art.