Exploring the individual constituent parts of painting : Cyanotype substance on paper.

Outpost 010422

Delicate Cutting

Symbolic of the 'connective tissue' which the photograph itself embodies, the pressure of the cold glass against warm skin glorifies the terms of the medium's indexicality, whilst also pointing out a fundamental disparity.

Notes On The Index, Krauss.

IMMATERIALITY AND TRANSPARENCY : Juhani Pallasmaa.

Technique and Expression in Glass Architecture, 2003.

The Poetics Of Glass

Glass And Modernity

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

The Technological Imperative

Between Polarities

Technique And Poetry

Return To Animistic Thought

Illusions And Reflections

From Form To Matter

The Secret Life Of Buildings

Mirrors And Symbols

Perfection And Imperfection

The Re-Enchantment Of Architecture

Introduction To Modernity

Henri Lefebvre

SPAB

Leaded Glass, repair, restoration, contemporary use of glass, architectural models in ceramic/glass.

In its framed state, Rothko's painting was constricted and not able to exist, as it should, on its; in other words, to be what it was intended to be.

Robert Ryman : The Dallas Installation.

Exploring the individual constituent parts of painting.

Untitled 1980-2003

Oil on steel plate with four fasteners, 48.3 x 48.3cm.

Page 1998

Oil and graphite on stretched linen, 38.4 x 38.4cm.

A series of visual experiences (interpretations on the art of painting), bracing,sensual, austere and luxuriant forms, calibrated to register from one work of art to the next.

The remarkable thing about Robert Ryman is that he has been working within his own matrix of questions, problems, and definitions for the past fifty years, and is still finding ways to make his art evolve from what has gone before.

Going beyond its appearance, to answer the question of what Ryman's art might mean is, of course, the challenge of abstraction itself, a challenge that has proven to be central to the art of the past century up to the present moment and that can arguably be seen still to define many of the issues of the art of our time.

Robert Ryman has investigated a basic set of closely related questions: how are paintings made, what are they made of, how are they installed in gallery and museum spaces, and hoe are these works experienced by those who come amidst them?

Ryman has concentrated on this specific line of inquiry by exploiting a highly select range of painting's parts: surface, support, medium, placement before the viewer, and importantly colour.

Ryman's art is about, and is itself, the paint on the surface of a material that is affixed to or hung on a lighted wall in a gallery or a museum.

It is a square made from any number of materials, and it shows exactly how it was made, what type of brushes or other instrument the artist used in applying liquid pigment, what its surface is, how its paint is affected by underpainting (the placing of one pigment over another to render a visual sensation), how its colours behave, what its material support is, and how it is placed before the eyes (scale has much to do with this), whether on a flat wall or somehow otherwise installed in relation to that wall.

Ryman describes the existence of something mysterious in Rothko with which Ryman was intrigued, so much so that he remembered its effect decades later. What stayed with Ryman, it appears, were Rothko's “form, structure, surface, and light,”

By the extreme boiling down of a painting's constituent parts, Rothko presented the viewer with an experience unlike any other to be found in contemporary life: that of a work of art defining itself and then acting strictly within this definition according to its own set of rules.

What was radical about Rothko, was that there was no reference to any representational influence. There was colour, there was form,  there was structure, the surface, the light, the nakedness of it, just there. 

What Rothko was after, the invocation of universal themes of human existence voiced through a vocabulary of numinous light-filled forms, was clearly not something Ryman pursued in his own art. Over and over, Ryman makes openly visible the way he paints and what he paints with: the meaning of the work seems to radiate insistently from these facts. 

Charles Wylie, 2005.