The artist uses a vast and diverse group of materials taken from both traditional art and commercial milieus including colored foils from shop window displays, acrylic medium and pastes, automotive lacquer, and useless everyday garbage taken from urban areas.
Even the exhibition and work titles are very often citations from different fields, such as song texts; they function as objets-trouvés of the artist's repertoire.“Originally I started to do gestural painting, but at the same time I was always interested in experimenting with different materials.
Indeed, in a series created from 2010 until 2013, Reyle playfully explores the origin of the figure by explicitly referencing the tradition of “paint-by-numbers,” thereby revealing the way abstract forms can coalesce and become recognizable subjects from life.
[7] While cheap and derivative, in their formal conception these forms recall the prominent abstract sculptors of modern art like Hans Arp, Alexander Archipenko and Henry Moore.
Instead Reyle uses his highly refined aesthetic vocabulary to question the role excess plays in the postmodern market by collapsing and mixing these various traditions in unexpected ways.
Indeed, by exploiting both historic languages and simultaneously developing an evolving vocabulary of new industrial practices and mass production methods he is able to reflect upon the various “blind alleys of modernity.”[8] Reyle's fascination for high gloss effects and decorative material taken from the merchandising world frames his critique of kitsch, and what the artist has described as “a tightrope walk that can be painful all the way.”.
By juxtaposing precious materials and trash, and by outsourcing his production, Reyle is able to make work that operates as a witness to our time and that prompts reflection on the prevailing values of our consumer culture.
The discrepancy in his works between the primarily sublime ideal of abstraction and the seemingly provocative decorative visual orientation generates an ambivalent tension and it is in this space that the form and subject matter drift apart.
In addition to his studio work, Reyle's interest in experimenting with unusual materials is also expressed in site-specific installations, such as his exhibition „Acid Mothers Temple“ in the Kunsthalle Tübingen (2009) or „Elemental Threshold“ (2010) in the Museum Dhondt Dhaenens, Belgium.
In 2017 on the occasion of his solo exhibition "Eight Miles High" at the König Galerie Berlin, Reyle presented three hanging sculptures, which were inspired by geometric wind chimes made of metal, such as those found as handicrafts at fairs.
These sculptures with their striking colours and encrusted surfaces, are inspired from flamboyant Fat Lava vases that appeared in the 1970s and ended up in flea markets as kitsch shortly after.
For this end, Reyle gesturally maltreats the material before putting it into the oven, he adds scratches and cracks to the surface that often break open the closed form of the vessel.
Those paintings are intense concentrations of contradicting dynamics; here Reyle plays out the dissonant colors and material canon that he developed over the years, in a free abstract form.