"The butterfly has become to Mark Grotjahn what the target is to Kenneth Noland, the zip was to Barnett Newman, and the color white is to Robert Ryman. Grotjahn's abstracted geometric figure is suitably elusive. In fact, the more familiar it becomes, the more he refines its ability to surprise and, perhaps paradoxically, takes it further away from actual butterflyness.”
A blazing and irrepressibly vibrant example of Mark Grotjahn’s scintillating series of Butterfly paintings, Untitled (Red Butterfly) from 2002 is a dynamic and conceptually rigorous composition with an astonishingly nuanced surface. Grotjahn has explored this esoteric motif extensively over the past few decades in both drawing and painting, and his devotion to a singular concept has allowed him to plumb the very depths of color, form and scale in a pure and unadulterated light. Characterized by a multitude of radiating lines converging on one or more vanishing points forming an abstracted “butterfly,” these works explore the structures of geometric formalism and serial repetition that have fascinated the artist throughout his career. During the early 2000s, Grotjahn pushed this aesthetic dialect further with compositions constrained by narrower, vertical format canvases, filled to bursting with radiating diagonals, of which the present work is a quintessential example. Here Grotjahn’s fractured geometry and densely textured surface create a mesmerizing depth and luxurious glamour, as the intense crimson hue strikes the eye with an almost bodily force. Applied atop a base layer of vivid royal blue, which flickers almost imperceptibly at the extreme edges of the canvas, the corrugated red impasto vibrates with energy, like a butterfly preparing to ascend. Exemplary of Grotjahn’s most astounding painterly achievements, Untitled (Red Butterfly) captivates our attention and launches us into a resplendent exploration of the artist’s alluring approach to abstraction.
"Grotjahn's butterflies hover precipitously close to the line between abstract geometry and illusionistic spatiality, displaying a kind of graphic unconscious that constitutes a paradoxically systematic disruption of a rational and orderly system."
Here, two off-kilter vanishing points mark the center of the butterfly’s “abdomen,” while flying rays dart outward, fluttering across the diagonal trajectories of slightly skewed “wings”—their tremoring vectors conjure the sensation of being captured mid-flight. The dynamic contrast between the hot and cool tones of scarlet and cobalt creates such vibrant energy that the competing colors simultaneously project forward, while the expansive rays etched into the oleaginous paint create an optical illusion as they appear to both approach and recede at top speed. Summoning natural world phenomena, while investigating the fundamental tenets of abstraction, the artist achieves a result that is as aesthetically seductive as it is rigorously analytical. As Douglas Fogle notes, "Grotjahn's butterflies hover precipitously close to the line between abstract geometry and illusionistic spatiality, displaying a kind of graphic unconscious that constitutes a paradoxically systematic disruption of a rational and orderly system." (Douglas Fogle, "In the Center of the Infinite," Parkett 80, 2007, p. 117) Operating within this tension between the ostensibly incongruous poles of abstraction and figuration, Untitled (Red Butterfly) complicates the formal correlation between the winged insects and the picture’s purely geometric organization of shapes.
The refined precision and forthright simplicity of the present work's symmetry and dichromatic palette are punctuated by celebrative reminders of artistic process, which refuses the precise, hard-edged line often associated with formal abstraction. Rendered in thickly painted strokes ridged with thinly carved veins delineating each band, the ruby striations possess a seductive gestural quality. At the liminal edges of the painting, Grotjahn purposely reveals the underlying substrate of blue; as Douglas Fogle observes, such a schema reveals “an archaeological depth (the history of their own construction) and a questioning of the work’s stability (these are not uniformly hermetic surfaces).” (Douglas Fogle, ‘The Monolith and the Butterfly’, in Exh. Cat., New York, Blum & Poe, Mark Grotjahn: Butterfly Paintings, 2014, p. 38) Within its carefully choreographed vectors, traces of the artist’s hand are documented and preserved, endowing the surface with an animated narrative element. Taut with formal rigor yet charged with expressive bravado, Grotjahn’s Butterfly paintings interrogate traditional notions of perspective, form and symmetry, creating a parallel pictorial and conceptual universe in which abstraction and representational painting collide.