Ellsworth Kelly

Throughout his development as an artist, Ellsworth Kelly’s choices produced an instinctive art that is singular among his contemporaries. In the exuberant age of Action Painting and Abstract Expressionism, the process of painting was paramount. Kelly’s art is altogether more contemplative and introspective, with the process of seeing in the ascendant. White Brown, 1968, is a reductivist and geometric expression of how Kelly saw the world around him – the shapes, the lines and the colors all in their purest and most immediate sense.

In 1968, Kelly started to experiment with the overall shape of his paintings, expanding beyond the traditional square or rectangle. As early as his time in Paris in the 1950s, Kelly had worked extensively on multi-panel paintings, as a literal, anti-illusionist means of depicting space through the division of monochromatic surfaces. Addressing the canvas as a structured object, and not an area of painterly gesture, Kelly proceeded to add dimension in 1968 with his new exploration of shaped canvases in works such as Blue Green I and White Brown. Made of shapes within shapes and in colors that juxtapose advancing and receding visual effects, these paintings set up contradictory perceptions and visual paradoxes for the viewer to contemplate. Is White Brown a depiction of a white rectangle and it’s darker shadow, or is it two individual, yet interlocked, geometric entities existing on the same plane?

Kelly’s interest in playing with viewer’s perceptions can be traced in his early work, from his preference as a student for contour over volumetric drawing, to his army days as a camouflagist. Beginning in 1965 and throughout his later oeuvre, this awareness for the telling shape of things led Kelly to challenge the art historical boundaries between painting, relief and sculpture. Multi-panel paintings installed three-dimensionally incorporating the floor, such as Blue Red (1966) cross-inhabit the three media and establish themselves somewhere in between the traditional definitions of each. Although Kelly ultimately decided that such radical and literal projections of geometric shapes were better suited to his free-standing aluminum sculptures, also begun in 1966, the experimentation brought a new rigor to his next paintings. ``It was through the making of sculpture and cutting forms out of metal that I returned to making joined-panel works on canvas, in which the ground was eliminated.’’ Whereas works such as the three-dimensional Blue Red challenge the definition of painting as object, White Brown tests the limits of how visual elements will contest the perception of a flat surface.

Within his self-imposed minimal artistic vocabulary, Kelly has succeeded in experimenting with perception without diluting what he considered to be the fundamental factors of artistic representation – color and form. It is not the process but the effect that interests Kelly, and in White Brown this desired effect is one of visually perceived paradox and contradiction. Even when the artist has restricted himself to two geometrically pure forms and two fundamental colors, he has maintained the ability to create a vision of flux.