Reiner's influences include
Old Master painters and modern figures such as
Mark Rothko,
Robert Ryman, and
Philip Guston; writer Fred Dewey makes links between Reiner's work and that of
Giorgio Morandi. Reiner's early, largely abstract work (which nonetheless references the physical world through color, surface, and text fragments) bears the influence of
conceptualism and
minimalism in its reduction of content and figuration in reaction. In the later 1990s, Reiner incorporated urban signage to a greater degree in small paintings (e.g.,
La Petite Beauty and
Grace, 1999) that indicate the aesthetic impact of
Richard Diebenkorn,
Vija Celmins, and
Ed Ruscha, who appeared with him in the show, "Urban Hymns" (Luckman Gallery, 2000). Peter Frank likened Reiner's painterly technique to
Barbizon realism, but noted a deeper, more metaphysical meditation on what he described as icon-like images of subjects more resembling "untree things"—clouds, heads of hair, tornadoes, maps, paintings. Petra Giloy Hirtz wrote that the trees—crooked, pruned by traffic or grazed by trucks, and strangely trimmed to clear views of billboards, signs, Christmas decorations or graffiti—each reveal a story involving "the domestication of nature by civilization, of survival in an urban context." His "Redentore" series captures pyrotechnic afterglows illuminating amorphous, shadowy masses of smoke that quickly recede in diffusing light. He painted them in wax and oil, the wax drying his pigment to create scarped, roughly textured passages of varying sheen, whose forms and visible erasures convey the passing of time. The initial project included watercolor studies and fifteen drypoint etchings, and culminated in fifteen large, chromatically different mixed-media canvasses. As a filmmaker, he has directed both feature and short films that have screened internationally at film festivals and in galleries. His short films include
Trees of Los Angeles (2005),
Signs of Los Angeles (1999),
Waking Up (1998), and
Balancing Act (1996). and the time-travel comedy and 1970s parody, ''
The Spirit of '76'' (1990), which starred
David Cassidy and
Olivia d'Abo. ==Public collections and recognition==