“It’s just a powerful pictorial image. It’s so good that you can use it, abuse it, and even work against it to the point of ignoring it. It has a strength that’s almost indestructible. It’s one of those givens, and it’s very hard for me not to paint it.”
A commanding vision of striking angularity and reverberating optical rhythm, Adelante from 1964 is a superlative example of the searing graphic rigor and exhilarating conceptual daring that distinguish the very best of Frank Stella’s prodigious oeuvre. One of seven revolutionary Running V Paintings from 1964-65, Adelante emerges from the apex of Stella’s radical interrogations of artwork and objecthood, summarizing the visual and conceptual explorations of form, structure, and the boundaries of the canvas that began with the Black Paintings of 1959 and Aluminum Paintings of the 1960s. Testament to the visionary nature of the Running V Paintings, the majority of the works from this series are held in institutional collections worldwide, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Glenstone, Potomac; and The Art Institute of Chicago. Adelante was first exhibited at Kasmin in London in 1964 and has since been featured in formative exhibitions of the artist’s work, including his 1970 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the 1983 survey at the San Francisco Museum of Art, among others. Adelante hails from the esteemed collection of the San Francisco Museum of Art, where it has remained since its acquisition in 1968.
Rendered in a monochromatic gunmetal sheen, the forms of Adelante zip along diagonals, an illusion of motion further augmented by the shimmering surface of the paint. In twists and turns, banded stripes careen across the length of the shaped canvas, racing along its contours in unyielding stria. As William Rubin, the curator of Stella’s seminal 1970 MoMA retrospective, notes, the modular repetition of lines trace the course of a V; “horizontal on the left, [the path] dips and rises chevron-like in the center, and establishes symmetry by returning to the horizontal on the right.” (William Rubin in: Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Frank Stella, 1970, p. 101)
Frank Stella’s Running V Paintings, 1964-65
“The obvious answer was symmetry—make them the same all over. The question still remained, though, of how to do this in depth. A symmetrical image or configuration placed on an open ground is not balanced out in the illusionistic space. The only solution I arrived at—and there are possibly quite a few, although I only know of one other, color density—forces illusionistic space of the painting at a constant rate by using a regulated pattern."
The bands propel downwards and then shoot back up in a seemingly infinite extension and ever accelerating pace. Where in the artist’s earlier Aluminum series “the shifts in tracking—the jogs—were all at right angles, and the sense of movement was limited to the vector pattern created by their serial repetition…[in] Adelante the entire field has become a single giant vector.” (Ibid.) Sharp interlocking angles create a feeling of forward momentum as the stripes turn and veer across the canvas and appear to travel at a new velocity “more akin to electricity moving through a microprocessor than mere automobiles traveling on a highway.” (Peter Halley, “Frank Stella... and the Simulacrum”, Flash Art, No. 126, January 1986) This energetic thrust is central to the conceptual underpinnings of Adelante, as the title itself, which translates to “forward” in Spanish, suggests a movement towards new possibilities in art, both formal and conceptual.
As they parade across the monumental canvas in crisply delineated intervals, the advancing lines of Adelante achieve a thrilling multidimensionality. Separating the stripes are pauses where raw canvas is exposed, a painterly avoidance where the flatness of the picture plane is irredeemably challenged. The crisp regularity and rigid symmetry of the painting’s configuration emphatically articulates the relationship of the two-dimensional picture plane to its three-dimensional support. Abandoning the impassioned improvisational immediacy of the Abstract Expressionist vocabulary championed by his contemporaries, here Stella acknowledges and embraces flatness as an integral, rather than incidental, characteristic of an artwork. "I think you're born with a particular sense of structure, and you can't really change it. My sense of how things go together, of what constitutes equilibrium, stays the same as, for example, the way I put things edge-to-edge, point-to-point. If you look carefully at works as different as the Exotic Birds and the Running V stripe pictures, you'll see that the Vs relate edge-to-edge and point-to-point in a similar way. Although it looks very different, it's the same sensibility" (Frank Stella quoted in: Frank Stella, New York, 1970, p. 79) Adelante’s rigorously calibrated surface emits a kinetic exuberance as the metallic powder in the paint reflects the changing angles of motion with each jog of the lines, while the narrow strips of canvas left between each block of paint state both the materiality of the work and the fragility of the illusion.
“Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting…. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas.”
Stella’s geometric repetitions challenge the physical and theoretical confines of painting while also destabilizing the supremacy of the rectilinear canvas, thrillingly exemplifying the artist’s ability to redefine abstraction as a dynamic and ever-evolving medium. As the curator Lawrence Alloway notes: “Stella understood shape in the larger context of architecture, that shapes were just units in a systematic process of building material to engage space by incrementally filing it or enclosing it”. (Lawrence Alloway quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Frank Stella: A Retrospective, 2015, p. 19) Disrupting notions of flatness and form, painting and sculpture, Adelante achieves an uncompromising and unprecedented dynamism, toeing the line between painting and architecture, conscious of both its grandeur and its flatness, of its interruption of space and sight. A commanding vision of enveloping scale and reverberating optical rhythm, Adelante speaks to Stella’s exploration of movement, space, and perception, and is an emphatic testament to his virtuosic mastery of the painterly medium.
Exploring the Legacy of Calder and Stella: When Art Refused to Stand Still | In Conversation with Sotheby's
