Stanley Whitney’s Nightwatch, executed in 2012, is a testament to the artist's exploration of the conceptual capabilities of colour within the manifestation of deeply hued grids of acute primaries, secondaries, and tertiaries. Since the 1990s, Whitney’s celebrated series of colour grid paintings, which simultaneously embrace the freedom of colour and the order of a geometric grid, have become the hallmarks of his painterly practice. On the surface of the present work, the colours appear to emerge and recede, expand and contract, defining space on their own terms rather than through perspective or traditional figure-ground relationships. Whitney best describes the dazzling optical effect achieved through his intuitive method: “I don’t have any colour theory. The colour is magic, and I want the work to be magic. I lay a colour down and that colour calls another colour, and then it’s a balancing act. You don’t want to have something dominate something else, and you want to have good transitions.” (Stanley Whitney quoted in: Alteronce Gumby, “Oral History Project: Stanley Whitney by Alteronce Gumby,” BOMB, 21 April 2015, online). Whitney describes his compositions as similar to the call and response flow of traditional African-American music, with one colour calling forth another and dictating the structure of the work. Like a jazz soloist, Whitney improvises with colour, spontaneously juxtaposing warm and cool, loud and soft, creating a work of arresting chromatic complexity.

In Nightwatch melodic diagonals of blue squares contend with counterpoints in yellow and orange, while patches of complementary red and green dance along the lowest row like the syncopation of a rhythm section. Whitney’s sublime talent lies in his ability to conduct an ensemble of colour, creating a visual and symphonic dynamism that eschews cacophony. A revelation, Whitney’s approach to painting arrived after many years of experimentation that saw the artist draw from a multitude of historical and cultural references, ranging from American quilt making to jazz. Varying approaches to both process and application, including a period of working on the floor with a mop, were informed by an internal pressure to synthesise the manifold influences of art history. Describing this ambition, Whitney said “I wanted something as open as Pollock but as structured as Mondrian. That was a big distance I was trying to work in, that space between those two artists. Which covers a lot of ground, a lot of possibilities” (Stanley Whitney cited in: ibid). Deeply influenced by early Minimalism, his Color Field predecessors, ancient architecture and New York’s avant-garde jazz movement, Stanley Whitney continues to create in the semblance of aesthetic abstinence to further deconstruct the idiosyncrasies of non-objective art. With a visceral sense of optical and sensorial beauty, Nightwatch furthers Whitney’s investigation into the complexities of colour, illuminating an entirely ground-breaking aesthetic language.