"I don’t have any color theory. The color is magic, and I want the work to be magic. I lay a color down and that color calls another color, and then it’s a balancing act.”
An arresting medley of contrasting and complementary colors executed on a remarkable scale, Stanley Whitney’s Radical Openness is an exemplary painting from 1992, the pivotal period in which the artist discovered and mastered his mature painterly language. Included in the acclaimed 2015 Karma Gallery exhibition Structured by Color: Stanley Whitney, Works from the 1990s and Now in conjunction with the Studio Museum in Harlem, the present work is reflective of Whitney’s deep exploration of abstraction. Whitney’s practice is marked by years of experimentation using varied processes and applications, including a period of painting with a mop directly on the floor. A sojourn to Italy and Egypt in the 1990s prompted Whitney’s epiphany: “I looked at the pyramids and found the last missing puzzle – it was density […] the space was in the color.” (Stanley Whitney, quoted in: Alteronce Gumby, “Oral History Project: Stanley Whitney by Alteronce Gumby,” BOMB, 21 April 2015 (online)) By employing a grid, Whitney discovered a framework with which to both order and liberate his paintings like Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers before him. With a structure built from rows of blocks of colors divided by horizontal bands, the brushstrokes thick and loose, Whitney unlocks a limitless realm of possibility, an infinite world of color.
In Radical Openness, tangles of red, green, blue and black on washes of diverse colors define space on their own terms rather than through tradition figure-ground relationships. These layered blocks segment the canvas, forming the grid to fabricate the larger composition. Though initially tempted to absorb the work as an amalgamate whole, the discerning eye begins to analyze the various interactions within the individual elements. In the first row, at the top right, a green scribble lightly conceals an orange scribble, under which a yellow wash peeks through. The result of this specific interaction of colors is entirely distinct, for instance, from the green thatching over the yellow wash in the second row on the left. In this manner, the blocks act reciprocally. The shapelier top rows acting as foils for the less-defined, darker forms that creep along the painting’s bottom edge. The blocks pulsate against each other, seeming to emerge and recede, expand and contract, connect and disassociate.
Radical Openness is an early work which possesses the frenzied, energetic brushstrokes that reveal layers of construction, which are absent from the later paintings. Whitney himself best describes how he achieves the dazzling optical effect: “I don’t have any color theory. The color is magic, and I want the work to be magic. I lay a color down and that color calls another color, and then it’s a balancing act.” (Ibid.) Working intuitively from top left to bottom right, painting becomes a kind of musical call and response for the artist – color as the notes and composition as the rhythm. As life-long lover of jazz, Whitney reads art through the rhythm, “when I first saw Cézanne, I thought, this is like Charlie Parker, only painting. It’s like polyrhythm, a beat and a beat and a beat and a beat, like call and response, you know,” (Ibid.) Implementing the improvisational method of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, he spontaneously juxtaposes warm and cool, loud and soft, to harmonic and dissonant effects. In Radical Openness, saturated orange and black squares dance alongside more muted white and blue squares, while the vigorous black squares lining the bottom edge keep the beat. Whitney conducts his ensemble of color to create a symphonic masterpiece.
"When I first saw Cézanne, I thought, this is like Charlie Parker, only painting. It’s like polyrhythm, a beat and a beat and a beat and a beat, like call and response, you know."
Whitney synthesizes his many influences – from Goya and Velázquez to Barnett Newman and Donald Judd – into a practice that transcends a single style. Speaking of his effort, Whitney says “structurally, I liked Mondrian and [Giorgio] Morandi. I wanted to have the openness of Jackson Pollock, but the color of [Mark] Rothko. I wanted to have all of these aspects in my paintings […]” (Stanley Whitney, quoted in: Exh. Cat., Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Focus: Stanley Whitney, 2017 (online)) Whitney’s steadfast exploration into abstraction culminates in the present work in which he achieves a true “radical openness.”
