Black & White and Big All Over
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It’s hard to believe, but during the course of his long and distinguished career, Ellsworth Kelly has never had an exhibition devoted to his blackand-white paintings. Now Matthew Marks Gallery has made amends with an intriguing installation on 22nd Street of seven such paintings, all produced this year.
These canvases may lack Mr. Kelly’s exuberant hues, but in other ways they’re just as colorful as his more familiar paintings. Six of these works consist of a layering of two canvases, with a trapezoidal one superimposed on a larger, 7-foot-tall rectangular one. One canvas is always white, the other black, giving the impression of a single, forceful intrusion into a contrasting field.
As always with Mr. Kelly’s paintings, seamless surfaces and clean contours suggest a certain orderliness of thought. The installation underscores this by arranging the works in pairs with similar but tonally inverted designs. Slight adjustments of dimension and angle, however, reflect the intuitiveness of Mr. Kelly’s attack. Each canvas is indeed a new experience: In one, a white oblong angles implacably through a black plane until it locks at the far perimeter; in another, a black quadrangle, its upper edge curved, glides gracefully through white, resting nimbly on the other edge.
The gallery’s vast space enhances the sense of solemn play, the white expanse of walls emphasizing the painting’s multiple shadows and imparting a peculiar thickness to the space around them. The grid of skylights neatly maps out the distance across which paintings address one another. On a fourth wall, a seventh painting from 2006 seems a bit like an odd man out; a horizontal array of black and white rectangles in a single layer, it feels relatively static.
To see evidence of Mr. Kelly’s spontaneous hand, one usually had to turn to his evocative drawings and prints of plants. Matthew Marks’s much smaller space next door features an installation of 18 abstract ink drawings from a small 1954 sketchbook. These delight as tiny laboratories of form, bringing the agile execution of his plant sketches to the tight, geometric idiom of his paintings. Inspired by shadows cast on the artist’s opened book during a bus trip, their looping and angular forms play fancifully with left-over shapes of bare paper. One untitled drawing features a rounding dark mass surging toward one edge, drawing with it a widening sliver of white; at the sheet’s top, the black’s contour shifts to divert and spread the upsurge evenly across the sheet’s width. Produced a half century before the paintings next door, they are striking testimony to a lifelong process of turning casual sightings into spacious images.
Mr. Kelly’s most conspicuous piece on 22nd Street is actually “Blue Red Green Black” (2006), which occupies a 24-foot-long stretch of wall facing the street windows. This work consists of four separate colored canvases, each a trapezoid with a rounded upper edge. Though handsome, it was for me less magical. Compared to the astringent rhythms of black and white, the less-ismore aesthetic here felt overly congenial, with the separate canvases wavering between independence and interdependence.
A concurrent installation at the gallery’s 24th Street space features four large color paintings from 2004. These consist of pairs of layered vertical and horizontal rectangular canvases joined at right angles to extend slightly past each other in two directions. In “Green Relief Over Blue,” a stolid cobalt presses from behind a placid efflorescence of green, seeming to overhang it, though positioned physically behind. All four paintings possess a unique, diffuse intensity: not the hairbreadth intervals of Mondrian, nor the rhetorical assertion of Donald Judd, but an elegant centeredness of their own.
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During a period in the 1970s, Thornton Willis’s paintings employed elemental wedge-like shapes vaguely reminiscent of Mr. Kelly’s designs. Mr. Willis’s more vigorous surfaces, however, have always reflected his debt to Abstract Expressionism, and in the decades since, the work of this 70-year-old painter has evolved toward dynamic abstractions of crisscrossing lines.
At Elizabeth Harris, his four large canvases mold space with bold singleness of purpose. His means are actually quite traditional; lines radiating from corners and occasional midpoints create tense, shifting perspectival depths, with several lines sometimes converging like the facets of huge, crude jewels. The resultant triangles build in overlapping, thrusting sequences, amplified by lively colors: sturdy oranges, electric scarlets and pinks, evanescent blues. Mr. Willis is an adroit colorist, pacing these hues with whites, blacks, and grays that are themselves fully colorful.
Despite their terse vocabulary, the compositions brim with contradictions. As soon as one thrust creates a space, another defies it, crossing flatly across the implied depths. Often a single, long vertical dominates the center, held forcefully by surrounding pressures. It presses several inches in front of the canvas edges — or is it a half foot behind? These paintings could be textbook examples of plastic dynamism, demonstrating how competing rhythms can cohere as a convincing space, even as literal distances escape logic.
Three smaller canvases in the exhibition have the same internal rambunctiousness (two in fact are studies for larger works here), their expansive rhythms belying their actual dimensions.
Mr. Willis’s style is a fairly blunt instrument, but he wields it at times with surprising subtlety. In “Spinback” (2006), plastic events have scale and repercussion. Beneath a jackknifing phalanx, a vertical drops downward, resolving at the canvas’s lower edge in a poignant fracturing of small blue, red, and yellow triangles — proof that a straightforward attack can have resonant effects.
Kelly Black and White Paintings and Sketchbook until January 27 (522 and 526 W. 22nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-243-0200);
Kelly Paintings until January 27 (523 W. 24th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-243-0200);
Willis until December 22 (529 W. 20th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-463-9666).