Source Hollandays, 1958/74

Untitled no. 3, 1976

EXCERPT FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT SLUTZKY

BY EMMANUEL J. PETIT

I was taught as an art student that it

was taboo to articulate the center of the

painting in too strong a way. The center

was a position in the canvas that didn't

want to be made too perceptually

obvious. As I began to become involved

with Mondrian's aesthetics of Neo-

Plasticism, I took that as a challenge. I

tried to treat the geographic center of the

painting as at once independent of its

surroundings and part of the

composition. Yet my painting is less

about an opposition between center and

periphery than an enactment of the

perceptual forces of push and pull. In an

early painting I did, called Source

Hollandays, the center of the canvas is occupied by a red square. But because this

shape immediately associates with its neighboring forms in different ways, the center

ceases to read as a center, and the eye engages in a multitude of relationships in

time. The black and white element brings the same idea into many other paintings of

mine. This idea has stayed with me a long time, through most of my paintings of the

1970s, '80s, and '90s, and eventually it has become a kind of signature. I suppose it is

an unconscious homage to one of my teachers, Josef Albers, to whom the center of

the canvas was very essential in his exploration of the square.

The central black and white element

denotes the ideal condition of

complementarity, one of the major

themes that runs through my work. More

metaphorically, it can be perceived as a

window of light and darkness. The white

is a field of light that seems to emanate

from behind the curtains of color to

expose the rear plane of the

composition. The black, on the other

hand, is an absence of light. It can be

read as a tear in the fabric, a black hole

that absorbs the light. So it has a kind of

metaphysical presence.

In some paintings, I consciously thought

of the black as the body and the white

as the head, making geometry imitate nature. In other cases, this element reads as an

axonometric solid. You can perceive a black roof above a white front facade.

Incidentally, this reading is a violation of the Neo-Plastic avoidance of any scale

references, of any allusion to real dimensions or representational relationships.

Nevertheless, the possibility of illusion is key in my work. As you will discover,

sometimes I paint this element in a very muted way – the white and the black look like

lost travelers in a huge landscape. In other cases, they are energetic and very

demanding perceptually; they become a perceptual irritant.

I am attracted to the hermetics of musical

Grand fugue, 1974

Spiral no. 4, 1976

Sketch for Chromeclusters, 1974

structures. Music is an autonomous aesthetic

language. It follows its own internal logic of

instrumentation and composition. It has its

own elasticity of tempo: it can slow down or

accelerate in endless combinations. Of

course you do have composers in the early

and middle twentieth century who make

montages, who take the sounds of the city

and merge them into their compositions, as

John Cage does in his performance pieces, for

example. But I am much more attracted to J.

S. Bach. I find his impeccable compositions

lyrically complex, ever changing, mysterious.

He produced wondrous structures of sound.

For example, particularly in his keyboard

music, there is a constantly engrossing

dialogue between treble and bass, a dualistic

interplay that Bach is a master of. He manages to weave treble into bass and bass

into treble – you can think of the right hand being white and the left hand being black!

To me, Bach's pieces have an emotional impact that opens onto a spiritual otherness.

He liberates through the clarity of his musical structures. This clarity allows for lyrical

interpretations by the performer and the listener, adding second and third levels of

poetry.

I regard painting as being as hermetic as

music. Just as music is governed by its

own compositional rules and not

beholden to representation, so painting

should be able to enjoy an absolute

dissociation from the representational

world. The latter is expressed through the

illusion of foreground, middle ground, and

background, the world of perspectival

space. By excluding representation, an

illusion of another kind becomes

possible, which is the illusion of color and

shape. This is a unique freedom that

painting can enjoy; it is painting's

"musicality." Just as much as sound

needs time to evolve into a musical

structure, so painting needs time as well,

"aesthetic time." Aesthetic time is the time that is needed to activate different spatial

constructs, and that is extendable by the viewer. I want the viewer to unravel the

complexity of a painterly structure, and at the same time I want to give a thematically

pronounced meaning to that structure. Of course, painting is a little more difficult to

isolate from the world than music because it is visual, and we live in a visual world.

Most of our perception of reality is gained through the eyes, and in a sense painting is

always competing with the visual field of the real.

I believe in painting's ability to

choreograph color and form in infinite

compositional variations. What I deal

with is polychromatic geometry.

Geometry is made to function in a

supportive way to the color concept.

Color also has an inherent structure of

its own; this structure has been

described in color atlases like the one

developed by Albert Munsell, for

example. Hue, value, and chroma are

the three coordinates of color reference.

They are like the Cartesian coordinates.

They can be visualized as a spatial

configuration that fits within not a perfect

globe but an asymmetrical spheroid. At

Chromeclusters, 1974

Guadaloupe Boogie-Woogie, 1956

the very top of this spheroid is white, at the bottom black. The poles are connected by

a spinal column of stepped grays, with middle gray residing on the "equator." The gray

steps are designated as values. Light emerges both in the differential between values

and in contiguous color relationships.

The color, value, and geometry of the

painting therefore feed back into each

other. This interaction is worked out in

the actual process of painting, the

proposition of which is constantly

changing. I start many of my paintings

with an initial sketch in which I notate

color within shape. I transpose the

sketch onto the canvas in a very thin,

tenuous, and watery way. I then begin to

alter shape, and a dance or duet

between drawing and color guides the

painting. I like to think of color as

something contained in jars and tubes,

to be released at the appropriate time,

when the spatial structure calls for it.

Color and drawing enter into a pas de

deux, and finally each holds its own. Most of the time color generates the idea of the

painting for me through its translation into geometry, its enactment of the three forces

of tension, compression, and shear, the primary elements of Neo-Plastic painting.

Mondrian articulated the aesthetics of

Neo-Plasticism as a doctrine. He

organized the canvas with nothing but

horizontal and vertical geometries and

used only a limited palette, all primaries.

He insisted on this, and when Van

Doesburg introduced diagonals in his own

compositions, the two stopped speaking.

It was a very dogmatic movement in

Holland! But what I admire in Mondrian is

not just the rigor of his Neo-Plastic

sensibility, but his stamina, his patience,

his search to enrich his own aesthetic

structures. When Mondrian came to the

United States in the early 1940s, he got

turned on to the energies of New York

City, as you can feel for example in his

painting Broadway Boogie Woogie. The amount of spatial ambiguity and syncopation

is incredible. The painting is very polyphonic. You can almost hear the painting in all

its complexity. At first, Mondrian's paintings disturbed me a lot. I didn’t like them so

much as a teenager. But when I began studying painting and drawing more seriously, I

saw their virtues. My discovery of his unfinished masterpiece, Victory Boogie-Woogie,

a square turned forty-five degrees into a diamond, was a major revelation, which in turn

triggered my acceptance of Neo-Plastic aesthetics.

So I developed a style of painting with

clear Neo-Plastic references. This goes

back to my three years at Yale in the

first half of the 1950s. Rather perversely,

given the strong influence of Josef Albers

there, I chose to restrict my palette to

Mondrian's primaries. Only in the early

'60s did I begin to accept the totality of

color.

While I was an art student at Yale I read

a lot of Gestalt psychology and got

acquainted with its terminology: figure–

ground, figure–field, constellation,

Homage to Gris, 1973

Untitled, 1994

Study, 1953–54 prägnanz, among others – I found these

concepts very powerful.

A painting is about the dynamics of form on a two-dimensional surface. It is an act of

energizing the two-dimensional field. In my early paintings, it was the adjacent

relationship of colors and shapes in the horizontal and vertical dimension that created

aesthetic tension. It had to do with one form functioning in two, three, or four different

ways in the painting. This structuring of ambiguity is the kernel of the "transparency"

concept that I developed with Colin Rowe in our Transparency essays written at the

School of Architecture in Austin, Texas, around 1955–56. It has to do with the field

being a thickened, finite, colloidal support for multiple formal fragments, and a release

from the representational world.

I inherited my obsession with employing

figural elements in a very fragmentary

way not from Neo-Plasticism but from

early Cubism – Braque, Picasso, and

especially Gris. Juan Gris was

responsible for a major pictorial

invention, namely the hermetics of still-

life structure, which he honed to a point

of pure poetry after 1915. He developed

a pictorial syntax based on diagonal

symmetries, in which still-life elements

engage the contained and finite matrix of

the flat canvas. They function in a very

different way from, say, Cézanne's

apples and pears, which still refer to the

infinity of illusionistic space. For Gris,

finite space wins out in the end,

although within his conception of space infinite geometric and metaphorical extensions

become possible. The reason I mention Gris is that in the past I have called some of

my paintings Homage to Gris. They are also gray paintings. This is how extrinsic

references – i.e., to the history of painting – occasionally enter my work.

Geometrically, the grid represents

repetition and stability. In addition, the

orthogonal grid is usually referable in my

paintings to primary colors: red, yellow,

blue, white, black. The geometry and the

color structure negotiate which element

is entitled at a particular moment to the

position of verticality, orthogonality, or

diagonality. I like to challenge the

painting's stability, as suggested by the

grids, and thus explore the instability of

stable form As such, some grids do not

appear to be plumb vertical in my

paintings, although they actually are so.

Only because of the sense of the

stability of grids can any rotation,

compression, or shear become

perceptible.

I often work with the inherent

contradiction between the nine-square

and the sixteen-square grid. The one

has a void center and has to do with odd

numbers. The other has an intersecting

linear center and has to do with even

numbers. The nine-square is more

stable because of its central void, and it

implies a sanctified inner space, a

classic architectural courtyard or

cloister. The sixteen-square is unstable

Untitled, 1986

Untitled, 1996

Untitled, 1986

and implies infinite extension. Ideally, a

grid is dimensionless; it is an intellectual

construct. By fattening the lines of the

grid in some cases more than others

through form and color, I give the illusion

of distance or nearness; the grid

becomes haptic. If you look carefully,

your perception begins to evolve in time,

i.e., you begin to unravel the mystery of

the structure and, at the same time,

possibly to indulge in metaphoric

extensions of your vision.

I do indeed believe in the ineffability of

art. And I am particularly critical of

theories that try to be descriptive of, or

surrogates for, the work itself. To say

that art is ineffable means to eschew

interpreting visual stimuli in ways that

must by definition invoke the

representational world. Words tend to

act pictographically, particularly when

they convey metaphors. The metaphor

all of a sudden corrupts the possibility of

enjoying the painting free of any

representational associations. At the

same time, metaphor is an inescapable,

if fleeting, by-product of vision. Only the

most abstract language, like equational

logic in mathematics, can aspire to total

hermetics.

By allowing drips to show in some of my

recent paintings I am demonstrating the

liquidity of paint and the receptive quality

of canvas to the acrylics I use. The

dripping of color exposes the thinness of

the paint and the fragility of the plane.

Sometimes I try to make my paintings

look like decalcomany – as if you could

peel the image off the surface. What is

more, liquidity is very structural.

Liquidity and absolute structure don't

deny each other. They mutually enhance

each other. Certainly dripping indicates

the presence of gravity and prevents you

from turning the canvas around (although

I have deliberately violated this rule on

occasion). But the painting's orientation

also cannot be changed in my work

because of way I weight form. I like my forms to be heavier on top and lighter on the

bottom. The pull is important – it's like pulling down a window shade. My effort to

flatten space and thus avoid deep space and representational space is aided by the

top-heavy elements.

In traditional painting space consists of

foreground, middle ground, background.

The foreground is at the bottom, the

middle ground is in the center, the

background is on top. This is earth–sky

thinking! I want to put the earth where

the sky is and to put the sky where the

earth is, because I believe in the

autonomy of painting. I want to break

Untitled, 1999

City, 1992

Untitled, 1963

with representation in this way, to

interrupt the gestures reflexive to the

outside world, to favor self-referentiality

in painting. In this kind of painting, there

should be enough power in the

configuration of lines and color to keep

the eye spinning within the structure,

which is completely contained within the

frame of the field. At the same time,

within the contained field I try to imply

an infinite extension beyond the

painting's edges.

In my diamond paintings, which I did in

the mid '60s, and subsequently in my

tipped paintings, of the late '60s and

early '70s, I turned the canvas anywhere

from 45 to 5 degrees in order to provoke

a more active dialogue between the

orthogonal figural elements and the field.

The diamond paintings had a more

stable (but still volatile) quality because

of their right-angle armature. In the

tipped canvases, the turning caused a

thrust to the left or right, a haptic

gesture. In both cases the edges

became diaphanous, permitting the

illusion of penetrations from inside out

and outside in.

In my two most recent series, rather

than tip the canvas, I make some of the

painted elements themselves

nonorthogonal. Thus I achieve the earlier

effects of destabilization and extension

solely through the illusionism of paint. In

these series I especially make use of

ricocheting chromatic vectors. These

implicate the edges of the painting,

causing them to appear either taut and

impenetrable or else soft and porous.

The two series are interrelated. In

general, the "pick-up stick" paintings are

about activating large sectors of field

colors and exploring relationships of

brightness and value. The "puzzle piece"

paintings involve a hide-and-seek game

with three pairs of complementaries that

continuously superimpose, undercut,

and rescale each other. In the latter

series the floating fragments make the paintings a little slapstick. They have a

carnivalesque quality – jovial, buoyant, celebratory.

For me the motivation in painting is very

similar to that in music. It is the desire

to break free from representational

images. I don't think you can name too

many pieces in music that start out with

the sound of kids playing in the

backyard. Instead, music starts off in a

"key" of some kind, then develops its

structure at a certain tempo, then

repeats this with variations. Music is

about playing with a theme – turning it

Slapstick, 2001

upside down and inside out, taking it for

a ride.

I believe in the pleasure principle in

painting! I think Bach believed in the

elegance of sound in his preludes and

fugues. For him it was instrumentally

produced sound that generated

pleasure. For me it is color that is

geometrically structured. I am explaining

to you the effect of aesthetic time.

Which is to say, the longer you look, the

more you find; the more you find, the

longer you look. It's a nice reverse

equation. Painting is perceptual music.

It has to do with the retina. In music you

need an ear for sound. In painting you

need an eye for color within geometry.