Terry Winters: Material and Mapping.

I find it continually surprising how much the art we respond to most, either as makers or viewers, is deeply connected to what we are exposed to in their formative years. The sympathies and rebellions we cultivate when we first plunge into art have lasting consequences that run biologically deep. I can only imagine the excitement of young modernists turning the academies upside down, spilling out to work in the capitals of Europe, forming groups and “isms” ever faster, blinking in and out of existence like quantum particles. As art schools became more professionalized[1], the sense of needing to advance a shared style or aesthetic concern seems to have diminished in favor of collectives with looser aesthetic dogmas.[2] Whether this is a cause or result of the rise of Post-modernism is an open question[3], but just as it would be foolish to dismiss the influence of pedagogy on the course of art, so it would be equally foolish to accord it as much scope when so much energy is directed toward revising the narratives of contemporary art.

As an undergraduate committed to painting, I was initially interested in figuration and narrative, but I quickly turned to abstraction as I worked through basic forms reduced to diagrams. I wasn’t interested in history painting or in the interaction of figures in actual space[4], but I was also not interested in the abstraction of material for its own sake.[5] My initial points of reference were Pop or neo-imagist artists, but I didn’t make a personal connection to the work, which led to my feeling a little lost. Then my teacher[6] took the time to drive me and a few other students out to see an exhibition of Terry Winters’s paintings.

It was a distillation of his Whitney retrospective, showing mostly large-scale paintings. They immediately grabbed me for their combination of scientific reference, painterly process and the integration of abstraction with a sense of space rooted in figure-ground relationships. His botanical forms were built out of impasto that sometimes seemed to be inches thick.[7] They floated in the diagrammatic space of the canvas or materialized out of scratching in the paint like corrections in a scientist’s field journal, and I was blown away. The work seemed to be speaking directly to me, a sensation that was enhanced as I digested Lisa Phillips and Klaus Kertess’s retrospective catalog. The influence went very deep and affected a great deal of how I made art, from an interest in every technical component of painting to building a studio practice that included continuous drawing.[8]

Other influences came and went, but I continued to follow Winters’s work, though mostly at a distance from New York, and so mostly through reproduction. Not knowing the difference between the real painting and the image as his work changed lead to a curious case of mis-translation. The final works in the Kansas exhibition showed him moving closer to his spores and blastula, magnifying them to fill the canvas and melding them with the painted ground. The paint was thick and luscious, like the wet-into-wet impasto of late Guston. Winters had not yet transitioned fully into the networks and fields that occupy him now, and when I first saw reproductions of the new paintings, I assumed they had the same surface topologies because I did not consider how much of his work comes from an interaction with the natural world.[9] Plants and fungi can be collected as specimens and held in the hand. Moving one’s point of view to the inside of a cell requires examination beyond the naked eye; the experience is at a remove, the material weight of handling glass slides under a microscope has given way to computer imaging on screens and the surface of the work shows the new source. Where I imagined near reliefs of painted networks, Winters was actually working much more simply and directly, with the linear structures graphed in translucent skeins.

Winters’s exhibition “Facts and Fictions” at the Drawing Center shows the transition clearly. As one starts clockwise around the gallery one can see how drawing led the way. The earliest works, on the south wall, are thick charcoal, chalk, and sometimes crayon and graphite; the images emerge out of a velvety density embedded in the paper. To anyone familiar with his paintings, the facture is instantly recognizable, although the paper’s existence as exposed ground stands as in stark contrast to the refusal to let primed canvas enjoy a similar spotlight. The back wall contains five works on large paper that shift quickly from drawing and mixed media to paintings on paper. The choppy structure and palette of “Animation” is echoed in the painting “Parallel Rendering 2” of a year later; the off-white of the paper is a similar value to the painting’s tan ground, and the traces of yellow behind the network adding traces of luminosity.[10] The north wall marks the transition to the exploration of the entire surface as a shifting and tessellating plane. Winters has moved through layers of magnification to spaces and fields described by complicated mathematics that are graphed on computer screens, and the drawings’ surfaces have shifted to precise skins rendered in shiny graphite with additions of charcoal or ink that are screen-thin.[11] Depth is created by the spatial alignment of the structure rather than the layers of material articulating relationships between figure and ground.[12]

This is primarily evident in the comparison of selections from the Schema series from 1985–86 to the to the 48 drawings in cases on the floor from 2006–16 (with different cycles emerging from the overall series). Both are comprised of letter format paper[13] that offer an encyclopedic view of Winters’s visual preoccupations at the time. In the Schema drawings there is a wider variety of material exploration, from pencil and charcoal to watercolor, gouache, and even oil stick. The botanical forms and cellular accumulations are laid out off-handedly; stacked, layered, and nested in scratched marks and jottings. Their placement responds as much to the improvisations in the painted field of space they inhabit as to mere representation. The heavy paper buckles with layers of wet media, giving a palpable linkage of biological and creative process. By contrast, the later series is dry, the paper retains its plane and the spatial graphing and forms tend to be centrally organized and often the deckle edge is delineated with a hard pencil edge. These images read as a mapping of the paper’s space. There is still space for improvisation, but the forms are ultimately more descriptive than their predecessors, even as they are more difficult for the layman to understand and identify.

Earlier in the summer, “Facts and Fictions” could be contrasted with Winters’s exhibition “12twelvepaintings” at Matthew Marks Gallery. One could examine how the spaces in the drawings projected to six and a half by five feet.[14] Color and texture articulate the surface, and the scale and painting process allows for more complex interactions between different descriptive systems. The paint surface did not grab me the way the earlier works did, but I appreciated their cartographer’s directness. As I left I found a small monoprint from 2004 in the back of the gallery entrance, under the stairs. The pale colors alternated between atmospheric space and border, reversing their functions as they interacted with other elements. A strip of copper rectangles along the top implied a sheet torn from spiral bound pad. The structure seemed to rise up off of the paper in embossed relief, delineating a twisting spiral space and an enclosing frame, and then pushing beyond the artificial border. Perhaps it was an experiment for the artist, but it struck me that I couldn’t help but see in it the physicality I’d always imagined in Winters’s large paintings. This avenue may not be important to the artist, after all many artists explore directions that are not important to their practice, but it was important for me to find.

“Terry Winters: Facts and Fictions” continues at the Drawing Center until August 12.

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[1] Yale’s MFA program sending Richard Serra, Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, and others right into SoHo seems like a turning point for the professional connections between graduate programs and the New York gallery scene.

[2] Consider the YBA generation that came out of Goldsmith’s; their work is really only connected by being collected by Charles Saatchi, rather than any shared aesthetic concerns.

[3] Although to be fair, the social snobbery and cliquishness of some strains of modernism would put many present-day teenagers to shame.

[4] Photography seemed to have secured this ground and rendering tableau in paint seemed to only be adding expressionist flourishes that confused the relationships of the figures to themselves and the space they inhabited.

[5] Yet.

[6] Sharon Louden, in what must have been one of her first jobs, and who has proceeded to do a great work on what it means to be a working artist in today’s culture.

[7] The phallic forms of “Pitch Lake” particularly stand out in this regard.

[8] It also led me to make a great many very derivative paintings, as is a common reaction for most art students.

[9] This really shouldn’t have come as a surprise, given how much the early naturalists figure in literature of Winters’s early works.

[10] The painting is more resolved, but where its yellow structure describes a source of flight behind the primary structure, the streaks of color in the drawing add to the sense of directness in the artist recording his intent.

[11] This is especially evident in the “7-Fold Sequence” works.

[12] This approach to the space of the artwork is evident in Winters’s prints, where an a priori articulation of the image is dictated by serial nature of the printing process.

[13] Artists’ approach to paper is always fascinating. Many process-based artists experiment with a broad variety of paper (Brice Marden and his use of Asian as well as European watercolor papers comes to mind), but Winters’s focus is on capturing the image, and his paper doesn’t call attention to itself as a unique material.

[14] Although the exact dimensions of the 2006–16 works are not provided, note that a letter size of eleven to twelve by eight and a half to nine inches keeps the proportions nearly identical. The use of framing devices within the paintings serves to further tighten the proportions.

Variations of One: Brice Marden’s Monchromes

For something that would seem so simple, so cut and dried, the idea of the monochrome painting has proved incredibly elastic. Supposedly a single color supported on a plane, its basic structure lacks analogy in other artistic mediums. [i] Reducing the object under view to such a supposedly atomic unit separates the time spent looking at a painting as distinct from engaging with other media. A painting can be taken in ‘all at once’ whereas the unspooling of narrative media cannot. Even within the boundaries of abstraction, sculpture’s requirement of a form existing in three-dimensional space pushes the actuality of shape and material to the fore. The time one must take to walk around a sculpture is the same progression to view a dance or film.[ii] Conversely, looking at a painting can be entirely contained between the frontal two-dimensional plane of the painting and the viewer, each mirroring the other. Perhaps this accounts for the totemic aspect of the monochrome, a painting which by virtue of its supposed reduction is traditionally placed at either the beginning[iii] or the end of painting.[iv]

Academic simplicity would place the monochrome at a nexus of geometry and gesture, between minimal reduction and the ecstatic expression of wide fields of color, in theory allowing for a painting that removes all but the barest traces of drawing. But as with totems, the range of implementation and function is as diverse as the people who make them, and their real world existence is far messier than is often intimated.[v] Painters have been exploring and pushing the boundaries of a single plane of color since Malevich opened his “desert of pure feeling.” The point at which one color turns into another is nebulous at best; turning as much on the stuff, the paint, and how it is applied: thick or thin or mixed with what; with what energy and direction, over what ground and with what medium. One of the most obvious stratagems has been making monochromes that include more than a single hue; even Makevich’s first Constructivist icon was a black square on a white ground after all. Painters, perhaps like shamans before them, seem to bristle at imposed restraint. This brings us to Brice Marden’s new exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, and his return to the monochrome.

Walking into the central space at 522 22nd Street the viewer is confronted by ‘Summer Square’, a large brown monochrome that stands as a seemingly stark refutation of his paintings of the last two decades.[vi] Turning to the right the multi-panel ‘Small Seasons’ cycles through subtly tuned variations on four basic colors seemingly propped up on underlying washes of paint that form a familiar footer at the bottom edge of the canvas. The show, spreading across two galleries, is intended as a statement, the argument of an exacting artist for the ground he finds himself on.

In a previous exhibition I felt that he was starting to search for a unity and synthesis between his two iconic bodies of work, the monochromes and calligraphic paintings. In works like ‘Second Letter (Zen Spring)’ rectangles of color flanked his more recent curvilinear networks. Those flat sections even had nearly identical proportions to earlier sections in his multi panel paintings, such as ‘Thira.’ However upon further reflection I would now argue that his return to the monochrome has been portended for far longer. Marden is noted for being a very particular and careful painter, with so much as a dangling line seen as a momentous change[vii], so it shouldn’t be such a surprise that the groundwork for this move was laid long ago. His original glyphs turned and twisted with the energy of calligraphy[viii], but eventually their contours regulated and flattened, becoming broader and far less dynamic, but deeper vessels for color. They became ribbons rather than writing, holding one color next to another just as a single panel interacted within a larger assembly of panels in the seventies and eighties. He has been been emptying out everything but color in his paintings for longer than we might recognize; the touchstone references of his work have largely resided in Asian art and calligraphy, so much that when he exhibited a single monochrome[ix], the focus was on its basis in the colors of delicate Ru ware porcelain, and his attempt to recreate it from memory. I do not recall these nine small panels of solid color pointing to a re-engagement with the monochrome, but in retrospect it seems obvious.

The key to Marden’s painting has always been his engagement with the plane, and how he delineated the subtle aspects of its geometry.[x] His early monochromes measured the grid off as a container for color, and the inherent regulation of the surface plane restrain his monochromes from entering the vast, open spaces of color field painting. This has always been the beauty of the early paintings: the material density is pitch perfect, allowing a sense of light to emerge from the weighty reality of paint without pushing into vapor or deep space (the muting of his paint with wax and his colors with gray probably helped). The relation of his body to the individual canvas was how he brought drawing into paintings that are typically seen as removing graphic engagement; early individual canvases regulated his gesture, and later single panels were individual units in a complex whole.[xi] Of course the calligraphic works were also based in drawing, and these new works are also based in drawing; the key to his new monochromes lies in the suite of small ‘African Drawings’, their importance revealed by their inclusion in the main exhibition space. [xii] The modest works on paper are where the paintings structure comes from, down to the proportion of the margin at the bottom.[xiii] Careful looking at the paintings will reveal the trace of an original formation of squiggles and scratches that have been subsumed in later layers of color. He is still charting and dividing the plane by incremental gesture, and using these to build up a wall, rather than a field, that nonetheless glows.[xiv]

Marden’s tentativeness expands the exhibition, perhaps beyond what is necessary. Paintings from the Nevis Stele series show the ribbons emptying out[xv], and ‘Uphill with Center’ serves as a bridge, albeit one that feels contrived. The ground of the center panel is the same pale blue[xvi] as the Nevis Steele paintings, and the ribbons that snake across the surface are the same colors as the monochrome panels that flank it, two on a side. It is as if he felt compelled to show us that this was an organic transition between bodies of work, but the constituent parts don’t work together. The color relations aren’t enough to overcome the graphic contrast between the horizon line created by the bottom margins of the four monochrome panels and the curvilinear tracery; it reads as a juxtaposition made in the studio, not a resolved painting.

The new work doesn’t need any such artificial joinery with the past. If there is anything tyrannical in contemporary art, it is the relentless demand for something new, paradoxically coupled with the expectation that the artist will maintain something close to a brand. Perhaps Marden is conscious of the strictures of his market, or perhaps his overall practice does as much to reveal who he is as do individual paintings. Either way, as an artist approaches their own winter no one should fault them for steps backwards, or those forwards that appear to miss. Marden should still be able to show us a thing or two; the paintings on Marble that he exhibited with the Ru ware monochrome harkened back to the works he made between monochrome and calligraphy, the so-called graph paper series. Underappreciated, these works, mostly on paper, pose a unique engagement with drawing and measuring the plane that would present a fascinating challenge to realize with the same sense of light in his painting. Energy and movement are preferable to a slow decline into hibernation, and there is certainly a precedent among shamans and calligraphers for expelling rather than conserving their final energies. Here’s to hoping that Marden can increase the tempo of his dance.

 

‘Brice Marden New Paintings and Drawings’ continues at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York through December 24^th.

 

[i] Perhaps the closest relatives come out of experimental film; Warhol’s ‘Empire State Building’ attains a similar aesthetic stance while effectively neutralizing film’s temporal aspect. One could also look at Cage’s 4’33” as a musical equivalent that

[ii] … but perhaps inverted, with the viewer providing the movement rather than the medium supplying it.

[iii] As a blank canvas.

[iv] See ‘Ryman’s Tact’ in ‘Painting as Model’ by Yve-Alain Bois.

[v] When handling totemic or ceremonial objects, what is often surprising is how sticky they can be.

[vi] Although in an age of press releases and teases, it’s not like anyone interested is unaware of the change in his work.

[vii] “(Real Marden-watchers will notice he’s even let a couple of lines dangle in space — a huge move for this ultra-circumspect artist, one that creates local concavities, triggering a sense that the whole surface is undulant.)” – Jerry Saltz.

[viii] It is worth noting that this energy is still contained in his drawings, and the artist allows an abandon in ink that is missing in his large paintings.

[ix] And a much more “pure” monochrome than the works found in the current exhibition, for the colors of each panel

[x] See Klaus Kertess’ essay ‘Plane Image’ in ‘Brice Marden Paintings and Drawings’ (Abrams).

[xi] This is where Marden distinguishes himself from Ellsworth Kelly. Kelly’s colors are typically flat and generic, and define space by their shape or relation in relief. Where Kelly’s shaped canvases project into and engage space, Marden remains committed to the single plane of the rectangle, and creates paintings where the color is embedded in the paint, rather than reflected off of it.

[xii] The main space at 522 West 22nd Street is the central thrust of the show, with drawings that follow from the African series and additional ribbon paintings residing next door at 526. The show focusing on prints at 502 West 22nd is not referenced in the press release, and serves to connect earlier ideas in Marden’s practice to the current show via a different medium.

[xiii] These margins again harken back to his early work, but are so wide as to be almost a caricature of the thin, revelatory strip he gleaned from Johns.

[xiv] That Marden gets such dark colors to glow connects his work to European painting more than Asian art. The nine panels of ‘Eastern Moss’ pose a nice rejoinder to ‘Ru Ware’; the shift between green and brown is subtle, and though not belied by the title, the colors are reminiscent of the deep color of rough, industrial linen, a coarse relative of the material that Marden paints on.

[xv] And the dates of these paintings showing us that it took a while.

[xvi] Or “pale blue” as much as anyone can identify a specific color in any Marden painting. They are not so distant from the colors Marden remembered in the Ru ware painting.