After coming to New Orleans to work on film, painting soon became his full-time occupation. His subjects were always people — people found in quiet moments of solitude. From childhood, he had been fascinated by hazy, black and white Civil War photographs, particularly those of Abraham Lincoln, a figure of considerable loneness.
Reichert’s faces and figures are hewn with pallet knife out of passages of black and white. Working without a detailed plan, he paints intuitively, shaping an environment of energy seemingly below the skin of the subject. From a distance, we see a dramatic figure; from close up, we confront a spontaneous orchestration of particles bursting from the canvas. Like many other notable portraitists — Van Gogh, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Richard Avedon — Reichert has created a technique that gets beneath the surface of his subjects and revitalizes the art form.