“While you feel the weight of the wooden supports, your gaze loses itself in something like starry skies: dizzying impressions of infinite distance in tension with the dense grounds.”
A prismatic atlas of sumptuous color, Ray II is a paragon of Sam Gilliam’s exploration of canvas as both painting and sculpture, which marked his pivotal contribution to the medium of painting in the early 1970s. Projecting the canvas into three-dimensional space with its beveled edge, Ray II engages multiple avenues of perception, oscillating between object and image to occupy a space between optical abstraction and tangible presence. Initially a part of the Washington School of Color alongside artists such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, Gilliam expanded beyond the strictures of painting by experimenting with the intersection of color and form, creating works of art that unfold in across spatial planes with resplendent chromatic intensity. A testament to their transformative presence within the history of painting, Gilliam’s work resides in permanent collections within institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Art Institute of Chicago.
Expansive in scale and enveloping in color, Ray II reaches towards the viewer in an illuminating wash of lustrous, radiating hues. Through tonal shifts, Ray II presents a traversable terrain, a landscape to be passed through or entered without relying on static perspective. The painted canvas is stretched across a frame that literally projects its sumptuous colors past the picture plane. By extending the canvas into physical space with a beveled edge, Gilliam subverts the role of the canvas as passive support, transforming it into an applicative device and an extension of the artist himself. “It is constructed painting,” says Gilliam, “in that it crosses the void between object and viewer, to be part of the space in front of the picture plane. It represents an act of pure passage. The surface is no longer the final plane of the work. It is instead the beginning of an advance into the theater of life” (the artist in: Annie Gawlak, “Solids and Veils,” Art Journal, no. 50, vol. 1, 1991, p. 10).
Sam Gilliam's "Beveled-Edge" Paintings in Institutional Collections
Ray II deliberately resists legibility and enacts an abstraction that, especially at the time of its creation, radically subverted the expectations leveled at African American artists. The painting radiates from a central point along the bottom edge, erupting in saturated networks of hues that coalesce and dissipate in a prismatic harmony. Vibrant orange and magenta undulate against saturated cerulean and periwinkle. Waves of chromatic energy disperse in a mandorla of luscious color that extends beyond the line of sight. Gilliam makes paint luminous, combining sophisticated color transitions with spontaneous grooves and ripples that mimic the qualities of light and shadow within the abstract composition. Tendrils of pigment expand outwards, activating the senses through synesthetic propulsions. Radiating with an inner celestial glow, Ray II elevates the sensory potential of color, texture and form.
To create the alluring cosmic bands in Ray II, Gilliam pooled a diluted acrylic paint mixture into the unprimed canvas, which he subsequently folded and twisted. Unfolding the work once it had dried revealed pillars of color made from the creases, a prismatic surface with the look and spontaneity of watercolor. The process marries premeditation and improvisation, mapping the interaction of body and object. “I pour to experience the effect of gravity,” said Gilliam, “I find that when these effects have to operate within measured limits they must be precalculated at definite intervals along the horizontal length of the canvas.” (Sam Gilliam in conversation with Donald Miller, “Hanging loose: An interview with Sam Gilliam,” ARTnews, January 1973) Gilliam then mounted the finished canvas onto a beveled stretcher, allowing the work painting’s sculptural presence to activate its surroundings. An infinitely complex and three-dimensional entity, the resultant image directly implicates the viewer within an intricate inter-relation between subject, object, and containing space.
“I pour to experience the effect of gravity. I find that when these effects have to operate within measured limits they must be precalculated at definite intervals along the horizontal length of the canvas.”
Emanating an aura of symphonic jewel-tone hues, Ray II is dazzling in both the scope of its technical virtuosity and depth of feeling. Ray II charges the gap between the work and the wall, subverting the tradition of painting as a two dimensional medium and fostering a universal dialogue between order and disorder, planned and unplanned, and sensorial and physical space. Moving beyond the boundaries of painting, Gilliam bends painting “toward sculpture, folding it into music, letting it hang with performance so that in the coordination of his hand and our eye, painting is beside itself.” (Fred Moten, ‘The Circle With a Hole in the Middle’, 2020). Ray II is a testament to Gilliam’s innovative structures and dynamic color, beautifully illustrating the artist’s contributions to the medium of painting that have cemented him as one of the great innovators in postwar American painting.
