Ellsworth Kelly at Matthew Marks - New York - Brief Article

In abstract painting, the last vestige of illusionism is a sense of psychological interiority, as in the muffled darkness of a Reinhardt, the not-so-veiled labor intensiveness of Marden's early multipanel paintings, even the ash-light emotionalism in Agnes Martin's restrained marriage of human touch to the grid. None of these routes toward romanticism is taken by Ellsworth Kelly, who risks a chilliness or remoteness overtaking his work, as it sometimes does in his sculpture, in particular. But the survey of Kelly's relief paintings and multipanel gray paintings mounted last spring at both Chelsea locations of Matthew Marks Gallery pressed the case for the ultimate grandeur of the artist's combination of hedonism and acuity.

Of all the postwar abstract classicists, Kelly most perfectly exemplifies in his work the French virtue of nonchalance, a pragmatic lightness of being by which each discrete element in his art perfectly inhabits itself without impinging on the existence of adjacent elements. Thus, paint covers canvas to a maximum level of color opacity but goes no further in filling in the canvas weave. The viewer is thereby given canvas and paint as material identities in equilibrium with each other, and is spared the romantic confrontation with paint as a psychic substance. Thus freed, the eye quickly moves on to take in color and shape identities and their attendent recognitions: hue, temperature, area, scale. The elegance of Kelly's formalism springs from a kind of perfect pitch for the way these recognitions work in concert to provoke memory, particularly associations of light tied to place, architecture and time of day, without resorting to illusionism of any kind.

The exuberant color we typically associate with Kelly was amply evident in the relief paintings installed at the 22nd Street gallery. In her catalogue essay, Sarah Rich takes pains to tie Kelly's color to fragments of the observed world: flags, urban architecture, a marina. The effect is to convert the color fragment into a figure of architectural presence against the cultural field of the white wall. The chronology of the paintings selected began with the small Yellow Relief dated 1954-55 and then leap- frogged in four-, then two-year stretches through the '60s before jumping to 2001--a progression that under- scores the periodic modularities that organize Kelly's artistic output. Other structuring motifs include the curve, trapezoid and triangle, all of which hold forth in the gray paintings. The ellipse, which appears to have given birth to the curve in Kelly's work, seems to have dropped from his image repertoire, perhaps because it can seem distractingly figurative. The triangle has also been featured in the relief paintings but didn't make an appearance in this grouping. As the two overlapping canvases of each of the relief paintings on view continually reassert the square (even in the extended rectangles hinged at right angles in the show's most recent work) it's hard not to feel that Kelly has evolved from sourcing his abstraction in the world to evoking a memory of the world in his abstraction--a shift in emphasis toward format itself as the springboard for creation and variation.

The five large gray paintings that were hung at the 24th Street space are some of the artist's most sober works, but there is a lightness of being at their core, as well. They, too, are intensely abstract. Their subdivisions yield no pattern that relates to an image in the world, but instead diagram divisions tied to the overall shape, whether trapezoidal or square. Each panel is a slightly different gray. The panels in one diagonally split painting are so close in value and temperature as to be virtually indistinguishable, but they are set just far enough apart that one feels more than sees a vibrational optical change along the edges of the two panels as they meet. I thought of the gray paintings as mirrors for the shifting daylight in the room, and there were moments when the lighter values seemed about to give way to sunlight within the paintings themselves. But not quite--the sternness of the formal premise prevails. It's as though the freedom of movement defined by the internal divisions within each overall shape is reined in by the color--another example of the poise Kelly seeks to uphold between hedonism and restraint.

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