Everyone knows that the future belongs to surface and color, self-generating and self-sustaining abstractions bound together in an undeniable presence that makes itself felt as art.
M anifested in a cacophonous harmony of hues and irradiant alloys, Estoril is a paradigm for Frank Stella's liberation of material, dimension and form. Stella’s matured oeuvre mirrors the radical shift of his celebrated explorations in Minimalism to the wrought sculptural works that mark his triumph in the innately abstracted medium of metal. At this time in his storied career, Stella had respited the visceral bluntness of his earlier artistry, and began to produce tactile explorations of tonality and form in mixed-media reliefs that featured baroque cadenzas, arabesques, and other organic figurations. The present work epitomises Stella’s artistic libations on the esthetical capabilities of art, and attests to the boundless range of Stella’s brilliance.
With much attribution to his artistic milieu, Stella fully adopts Abstract Expressionism and its characteristic personal involvement, with distinctive credit due to the titans of the philosophy such as Franz Kline, and critically to Stella's dogma, Jasper Johns- whose geometric studies inspired Stella's early work. Estoril is a centrepiece from the artist's acclaimed race track series commenced during the mid-1970s, inspired by racetracks from around the world.
The present work takes the forms of the Estoril circuit, a Portuguese course that particularly left Stella infatuated with racing culture. Utilising an array of illustrations and maquettes, the artist enlarged and recreated an aerial perspective of the track, capturing the fluidity and flux of the circuit. Characterising this depiction is a mixture of ridges and arches amalgamated with a lucid spectrum of hues, canopied by its own form. Stella achieves this composite by utilising the Flexicurve, a drafting instrument that creates snake-like undulations. These feature abundantly in Estoril with a profusion of other curves, gaps and iridescent plateaus- all intertwined and overlapped so that the identity of the individual components is almost overwhelmed. Deciphering the entanglement is a deliberately charged process, particularly due to Stella’s disruption of this unscrupulous harmony with material obtrusions cast from remnants of the sheet cutting process. The result is a nebulous experience, as Stella ushers viewers into a labyrinthian narrative inducive of their perceptual and tactile faculties. Ultimately disrupting the industrial nature of this work are the crisscrossing parallels etched into the facade of the metal, and swathes of paint coating the sheets- resulting in a profound and organic lustre contradictory to their medium. Stella believes these touches alter the character of the factory-made pieces, rendering them corporal. He contends that "painting these metal reliefs is a way of infusing the piece with life; the brushstrokes, the flow of paint, might be compared to the circulatory process in the body" (the artist cited in: Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art (and travelling), Frank Stella 1970-1987, p. 3.)
"Painting these metal reliefs is a way of infusing the piece with life; the brushstrokes, the flow of paint, might be compared to the circulatory process in the body."
One of the most highly regarded post-war American painters still working today, Frank Stella has mastered a cacophony of mediums over the span of six decades. Premiering within the vein of restrained minimalism, bold and maximalist tumults of colour like Estoril encapsulate Stella’s genius in deviating to the extension of his designs far from the picture plane- resulting in unfettered fioritura swarming the ends of his oeuvre in the form of magnificent trelliswork. The laxity and grain of Estoril synthesises pulsating tension and an elevated sense of spatiality. Stella brilliantly urges the eye of the viewer in a frantic, pulsating fervor of sensation that mirrors its racing origins as the composition is optically lapped in a multiplicitous dynamic that hallmarked Stella’s artistic radicalism.
