Crit Sketch

Tangle Rectangle, 2019, oil on canvas, 74 x 90 in. (188 x 229 cm)

I can't believe I'm doing this, taking an image of a painting I have yet to see from a website (the artist's dealer's) and re-posting it on my blawg without knowing what, if anything, I will say about it, but prepared to say something all the same. I guess it's the idea of this painting and what it suggests from what I can see of it that has me wanting to "hang" it before you, follow it with words.

Where to start? Well, I've started. But in addition to that, a big white painting that isn't just white because the attempt at depth, as if visited by an early-1960s Rosenquist brush stroke, is "supported" by shadows, black shadows, and that for now is race relations. The successive (regressive?) white rectangles assume their neatness, but life's alive with jiggles and the shadows "reflect" that. Not as tangles, but as entangles; that is, the representation of the relationship between the rectangles and the light that gives us life as race relations.

Portraits are verticals, still-lifes square. Landscapes make great rectangles, as do history paintings, and this painting, like the narrative landscape paintings of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, is both. Indeed, I would even go so far as to suggest that this painting could be one of two unseen paintings hanging in Kerry James Marshall's Untitled (Underpainting) (2018) if the artist, like Robert Ryman, was born in the 1930s.