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Now of course, when we look at *** paintings,
they’re familiar and they’re accepted.
At the time that they were made,
they were an affront; they were downright shocking,
because they were an attack on painting itself.
To make this work, *** placed the canvas on the floor and
spattered and dripped the paint, making a painting which is
about the substance of paint itself, the fact that paint is liquid.
And when we see
paint on canvas, normally
that’s hidden.
You know paint is made to resemble
something else,
whether it’s the sky,
or a field or flesh.
But what *** does is just present us with paint as paint. He was the first person to do this. Many people have tried to
copy ***. None of them have the
energy, the spontaneity
and the sheer skill in handling paint that he has.
From afar you read the painting as being different shades of gray, fairly restrained, but when you get up
close, other colors jump out at you, so to begin with
it appears as if *** spatters matte black paint which seeps into the bare canvas.
And then on top, he’s layering this riot of colors: silver, cream, pink,
gray, touches of green, turquoise and
yellow. You think of it as being a flat
image, but it’s this very, very built up,
knotted, clotted
surface. Sometimes the
lines are quite
thin and fine. At points
the paint pools, and starts to clot and
is even smeared. Some paint is fluid, other
paint is shiny and forms impasto on the surface,
so the painting is quite textured.
The paintings are all incredibly human in the sense they’re scaled to the reach of
***’s arm, so each of those lines
is recording the gesture of his hand as it moves
over the canvas. So even though the work is now sixty or more years old, you’re
aware of the moment in which it’s made. So in a sense,
***, the artist, is present here with you as you’re looking at the painting. This painting is incredibly
honest; *** isn’t trying to fool us in any way. However, our brains can’t resist trying to read perspectival depth.
They draw you into this forest or thicket of lines and paint.
You could characterize them as landscapes of just paint itself.
No matter what your background is, what your understanding is of twentieth-century art,
of any art, there’s
no requirements, there’s no iconography. They’re
open to everyone. The immediacy with which it was painted
is also the immediacy with which we can encounter the
work and understand it.