RICHARD TUTTLE / ROMA AND OTHER WORKS

Susan Harris New York, November 2012 The capacity to mystify, illuminate and inspire lies at the heart of Richard Tuttle’s art. Tuttle’s relentless quest for truth and knowledge, his enthusiasm for discovery, his drive to explore what he has not previously known or experienced and his mindfulness of the interaction between his own inner states, the energy of a work, and the energy that surrounds it, allows each work to find its ultimate form as an autonomous object in the world. Tuttle’s transformation of mundane materials into art celebrates the joys of seeing and fosters an awareness of the connections between art and life. "Z 3" is a wall relief from 1981 that features a series of eight rolled newspaper pages each painted a vibrant hue of green, blue, red or yellow and affixed to a cardboard backing. Jutting out beyond the cardboard and wood support, yet tethered to it by two nails, the colored relief invokes Picasso’s synthetic Cubist constructions even as it seems to fly away from the picture/wall plane. Moving to the side reveals a half-moon shaped piece of wood below the relief with a swath of thick black paint that is pierced by the line of a nail connecting all of the constituent parts. A tour de force of material and spatial complexity, one witnesses, at once, the breaking apart and conflation of painting, sculpture and drawing and, no less, a sense of time and space. The radicality of Tuttle’s achievement began in the 1960s when, during the upheaval that saw a widespread challenge to the status quo, he embarked on a sustained inquiry into the nature of art. His unframed drawings of the 60s and 70s erased the divide between an artwork and its surrounding space as they hung directly on the wall according to specific stipulations of height and centering. The instructions on the back of "Untitled", 1975, for example, read “52 ½ in center/center of wall and center of drawing are matching at 52 ½ in from the floor,” thus tying the drawing to the installation and the space itself. Charged with a quiet insistence and an almost mystical sense of poetic understatement, the three staggered and wobbly lines of primary color bounded by pen in a large field of white space is part of his ongoing investigation into how line might embrace color. In the early 80s, Tuttle did numerous series of delicate watercolors on ordinary paper in rough-hewn, patched-together wood frames. Shadows cast by the hand-made frames and the buckling of the paper lend the drawings an object-like quality that locates the two-dimensionality of drawing in real space. These, as all of the works throughout his non-linear oeuvre defy classification as painting, drawing or sculpture as the artist successfully erases distinctions between a work, the space, the viewer and the process of looking. Richard Tuttle – “Z 3”, 1981 Paper, metal, wood, watercolor on paper mounted on wood 11 X 8.6 Inches (28 x 22 cm)
AMERICAN & ITALIAN ART 1975 – 2011

Cornelia Lauf Rome, February 2012 A few years before his death, legendary American artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) embarked on a series of sculptures appearing markedly different from his previous works. With their playful titles and otherworldly aspects, the “Splotches” or “Splats,” “Whirls” and “Twirls” seemed dissociated from his severely pared-down visual language. “Splotch #17” seems to fly in the face of the LeWitt’s iconic, overtly geometric repertoire. “Splotch” is after all a comic strip word, more apt for a bronze by Roy Lichtenstein than a fiberglass by LeWitt. It conjures the sudden burst of an ink pen when it malfunctions and leaves a mark, error, or mar on the page. The ink spot ejection has been much theorized as a symbol of sexuality or creativity starting with Sigmund Freud, if not earlier. Spurts mimicking the random deposits of a pen delighted the surrealists as they had the Japanese ukiyo-e painters, Joan Miró, and so many others, all the while suggesting, as Sol LeWitt tellingly emphasized, that randomness was an effect never willfully achieved. Organically freeform, “Splotch #17” may appear unrigorous at first. But propelling every LeWitt project is a concept distinctively elaborated. This sculpture resembles a nearly six-foot square mountain range that could be called crystalline, were it not deliberately rounded off and turned into something more like algorithms. Its irregular peaks seem to come from a random yet purposeful personal code that maps the decision reflexively to turn play into work, and work into play. The team-production of LeWitt’s work is a hallmark of a generous and democratic instinct. This sculpture began with LeWitt drawing an utterly irregular form on a page, departing happily from his usual affiliation with Euclidean geometry. He then must have copied it, filling in the shapes while here retaining his trademark non-color, white, a standard he has applied to works since he began making art. A second working drawing delineated the future sculpture’s height variations, much like a topographical map of a mountain range. These interconnected drawings then were digitalized by LeWitt’s sensitive collaborator, Yoshitsugu Nakama, to create a 3-D computer model that the artist could only have imagined. The model informed the cutting of many sheets of board that were assembled and glued like slices in a loaf of bread, covered with epoxy resin, then intensively sanded, primed, and varnished. Process is only one aspect of any sculpture. In final form we also sense its aesthetic filiations, its references historically distant and near. Here Bruno Taut and the Glaskette, Lyonel Feininger, M.C. Escher, Giovanni Piranesi, musical frequencies, and computer imaging itself all well up from one whose imagination frequently has been compared to that of J.S. Bach. Closer still are the Parisian artists LeWitt would have studied as a child; the drawings nod to Fernand Léger and Jean Dubuffet. But this would be art history. Instead, let us first examine and enjoy what stands splendidly before us. Sol Lewitt – Splotch #17, 2005 Fiberglass – 68 x 68 x 68 inches (173 x 173 x 173 cm) © 2012 The Lewitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (Ars) New York
HOMAGE TO KERMIT CHAMPA

Karen Wilkin New York, October 2011 Beginning in the 1960s, a group of mostly young American painters, who included Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Larry Poons, made their presence felt with a new approach to abstraction, based on the primacy of color and the emotional resonance of hue. Their point of departure was the open, all-over expanse proposed by Jackson Pollock’s pulsing webs, but they challenged the layered, contingent gestures and overt emotionalism associated with Abstract Expressionism. Their work – later labeled “Color Field” – was notably “cool,” in the Marshall McLuhan sense of the word: disembodied, dispassionate, and radically abstract, informed more by Henri Matisse’s adventurous explorations of color than by the quest for “authenticity” of their immediate forebears among the Abstract Expressionists. Color Field painting could be frankly beautiful, designed to compel attention through purely optical means; pools and sheets of radiant chroma appeared to have somehow magically manifested themselves before us, almost without human agency, without losing the power to stir our feelings. Yet Color Field paintings not only ravish the eye, but also engage our intelligence and feelings, through the associative power of radiant hues and dramatic size, wordlessly, in the way music does. It seems fitting that important works by two of the most daring and inventive of the painters associated with the term Color Field, Jules Olitski (1922-2007) and Larry Poons (born 1937), should have been acquired, soon after they were made, by the perceptive art historian and critic Kermit Champa. Olitski’s startlingly pared-down canvases of the mid-1960s seem to test the limits of abstractness, as if posing the question, “How much can you leave out of a picture and still have something exciting to look at?” Made by spraying intermingled mists of color, rather than by sweeps of a loaded brush driven by the hand, they distill painting to its most ethereal essence. Poons’s equally startling “thrown” paintings, made in the 1970s, co-opt gravity as a painting tool. Rivulets of dense pigment cascade down the canvas, fusing to create walls of inflected, complicated color that are at once declaratively physically present and as elusive as Olitski’s weightless sprays. Both Olitski’s and Poons’s works are deliberately devoid of allusion or narrative, yet each embodies a distinct (and very different) mood, feeling tone, and emotional temperature; each demands that we pay attention to its nuances in a different way, just as musical compositions in different keys, for different instruments, and with different time signatures do. That these enigmatic, seductive paintings should have been selected by the discerning eye of a young art historian who would be internationally known for finding correspondences between painting and music seems not only appropriate but perhaps inevitable. Professor Champa’s scholarship grew focused on the persuasive parallels he drew between the art and concert music of the 19th century. His perceptions were obviously just as acute and just as multivalent in relation to the painting of his own time. Jules Olitski - "Demikovsky Trance", 1965 Acrylic on canvas - 79 x 21 inches (200.6 x 53.35 cm)