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Frederic Matys Thursz at Lelong - paintings - Brief Article
Art in America, Jan, 1999 by Lilly Wei
That monochrome painting is still suspect in the greater world always surprises me. For example, Art, Yasmina Reza's play now on Broadway, imported from London--the scene of much more controversial art at the moment--has, as its culprit, an all-white painting. While the debate is ultimately more about the cost of such a painting ($40,000) than about esthetics, it nonetheless assumes that monochrome continues to possess iconoclastic punch. But surely, even in the arena of pop culture, that no longer obtains. Monochrome and all-white paintings, from Malevich's squares to Rodchenko's legendary red, yellow and blue canvases of 1921 on view in MOMA's summer Rodchenko show to Ryman's works and beyond, are art-historical facts, an established category of 20th-century painting, more mainstream than otherwise and arguably modernism's iconic image. Of course, there are those, even in the art world, who consider monochrome esoteric, ineffectual and fraudulent, as do some of the play's characters. There are also those for whom monochrome has always equaled monotony, and yet others who fiercely believe in its legacies, which inspire work as diversified as anything else in art.
Frederic Thursz, who died in 1992, pointedly refused the designation of monochromatist. His paintings are not one color but the result of multiple layers of different colors, sometimes hundreds of layers. Thus they are not reductive but a full complement of painting process and materiality, deploying an arsenal of painting techniques with everything essential to painting retained and emphasized: composition, range and gradations of color, touch, texture, movement, image, yoking the sensual and sublime together.
Most of the eight paintings in this recent show were made around 1990, or at least finished then, and are of moderate size although much larger work is more characteristic; some were hung as diptychs. These are not elegant estheticized objects. Thursz's surfaces have, at times, been criticized for the ungainliness of their facture, unlike, for example, the lush, ravishing skin of Brice Marden's monochromes. But it's the surfaces that convey Thursz's color--rich, unmatchable yellows, violets, red-violets, fuchsias, roses, blue-violets, his signature vermilions--and they cannot be separated from it. Opaque, gritty at times, scumbled, pitted, the paintings glow with a luminous interior color that is structured out of the specific application of paint, a color that is both latent and present, immanent and actual, scaled to the support--stretched linen, paper, linen on aluminum--and contained and defined by it. It is this color, shifting from dim to radiant, like a fire within, kindled by different conditions of exterior light, that constitutes the singularity and beauty of his work with its particular mix of materiality and metaphysics, of pragmatism and poetics, with its dream of painting as pure, autonomous color. The questions then: are we still afraid of red, yellow and blue, and why?
COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
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