Ellsworth Kelly

New York, Joseph Helman Gallery, Masterworks - Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, October - November 1996
New York, Joseph Helman Gallery, Ellsworth Kelly Masterworks - Two-Panel Paintings, November 1998, cat. no. 5, illustrated in color

To regard White with Black Triangle (EK 505) is to stand before a vast surface without boundaries – an inviting, contemplative space for the viewer. The painting’s spare geometry and palette are refreshingly pure - a perfect beginning which is completed only when the viewer experiences the canvas firsthand. Through spare geometry and reductive palette, Kelly has created a work which, in characteristic style, is simultaneously humble and grand. The complex underpinnings of White with Black Triangle (EK 505) belie its apparent simplicity, making it a masterpiece of understatement.

Kelly has long been regarded as today’s preeminent abstract geometric painter. Known for his serene, eloquent canvases which combine line, edge and plane with breathtaking economy of means, Kelly’s use of color is equally paramount in his art. White with Black Triangle (EK 505) employs two seemingly non-colors; however, in Kelly’s hands, these polar opposites become tools of illusion. Contemplating the canvas, the viewer is led into two spaces: the eye can luxuriate either in the purity of the white or in the velvety blackness, but it is in their simultaneous realization that the colors serve the artist’s ultimate purpose. The asymmetrical juxtaposition of black with white throws the viewer’s perception of depth into question, as the two planes of color can present many different visual relationships – the two can seem to glide sensually against each other in a sloping motion or they can alternately recede into or push forth from the wall as support for the canvas.

In White with Black Triangle (EK 505), Kelly plays with the notion of duality not only through the dual nature of his color scheme but also through the structure of the canvas, two joined panels. Kelly’s geometric choices can range from similar sized and shaped joined canvases to juxtaposed opposites, and the power of White with Black Triangle (EK 505) derives from the opposing duality of its shapes that complement the opposition of the palette. In his multi-panel paintings of dual colors, Kelly makes careful choices in the calibration of the mass of his color forms and in the `weight’ of the individual color values. The larger mass is often conveyed in the lighter `weight’ color, allowing for a balance in the composition. In Black and White Bar II (1971), Kelly accomplishes a careful balance of ratios. The extensive width of the white upper panel could effectively overwhelm the smaller black panel, so the artist gives the white bar a slightly shorter height than the black rectangle at the base. The robust color value of the black rectangle and the fact that it is slightly more than half the width of the white bar allow for a solidity to the geometry of the composition.  In White with Black Triangle (EK 505), Kelly joins a rectangle with a triangle. The area of the rectangle is larger than the triangle, yet it is not allowed to dominate the composition since it is articulated with the `lighter’ color of white. The black triangle therefore appears of equal weight in the composition, balancing the rectangle and holding it in plane on the wall, just as the horizontal upper edge or `horizon’ of the black triangle parallels the floor.

Despite the spatial illusions of White with Black Triangle (EK 505), Kelly ultimately returns the viewer’s attention to the painting’s flatness and its identity as an object mounted on the wall as support. The two joined canvases resolutely describe a flattened space, whose boundaries are defined only by the wall they inhabit, held in place only by the line which divides the paintings two parts. Visually this line vibrates from the tension between void and space, light and dark, white and black. It poetically relates to Kelly’s primary aesthetic investigation – the nature of perception. As early as his days in Paris in the 1950s, Kelly had taken photographs that captured patterns in architecture, stairs, walls, and windows in fragmentary glimpses. In early collages and reliefs, Kelly further highlighted his concerns with angles, curves and shadows – in other words, with the edges of things.  The imagery of one of his seminal paintings, La Combe I (1950), derives from a study of shadows cast by a handrail on stairs to his second-floor room in France, and this legacy of the perception between white and black is alive in the vibrant boundary between the two panels of White with Black Triangle (EK 505).