This
Show. . .
is for anyone who has ever stood in front of a painting by Bonnard and had to
take a deep breath
sticks its head into the chaotic laboratory designated for inventing things
the
mind doesn’t yet know
is about bending, tensing, moving and choreographed torsion
is about the mutual desires of painting and sculpture
is for celebrating the elasticity of the erotic body
could have been called “On the Passage of a Few People Through the Outer
Limits of Henri Matisse”
opened in a season when abstract painting appeared to be giving a lot of people
the willies; it was the time of Documenta X and the 1997 Whitney Biennial
is about irregular contour, repeated or reinvented gesture and architectonic
complexity
tells a history, if anyone is interested, a history not yet found in the official
version
would have liked to include a 14th-century altarpiece by Pietro Lorenzetti
and
Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film Pierrot le Fou
is for those who believe that art can still profitably concern itself with
the
pliability of color and form, and also for those who don’t
is for Max Beckmann, who said “Everything intellectual and transcendent
is joined together in painting by the uninterrupted labor of the eyes”
is for Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell
is dedicated to the proposition that abstract painting and sculpture can continue
to thrive only by achieving new degrees of suppleness
remembers Philip Guston, who said, “Looking at this painting, Clark Coolidge,
a poet who lives about 30 miles away, said that it looked as if an invisible
presence had been there, but had left these objects and gone somewhere else.
I like that kind of reaction, compared with reactions like ‘The green works,
the blue doesn't work.’”
owes a debt to Merleau-Ponty, who wrote “To learn to see colors is to acquire
a certain style of seeing, a new use of one’s own body; it is to enrich
and recast the body image.”
owes Merleau-Ponty a greater debt for writing, “It is by lending his body
to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand
these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body -- not
the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is
an intertwining of vision and movement.”
is about using knowledge instead of displaying it
is for the artists in this show
is a wager on the outcome of bringing together, for the first time, two generations
of artists whose oldest and youngest representatives are separated by almost
50 years
is for philosophers who like to dance
is for the incomparable Malcolm de Chazal, who wrote “Sepa- rated in the
world of things, colors have group sex on the retina. Think of it this way: if
there were no light, nothing could
exist; hence, everything is ‘sex.’ What painting actually amounts to
is the fashioning of the picture surface into a second retina so that the intercourse
of the colors might be doubly visible to the eye’s beholding.”
Raphael Rubinstein
© 1997
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