NEW YORK: Kenneth Noland at Andre Emmerich - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

It is tempting to diocese Kenneth Noland's new circle paintings, the final exhibition at Emmerich's groundbreaking gallery, as summarizing issues from the great era of American abstraction, when Color Field painting became first a transcendental, then a formalist language. Certainly these works reflected sound the format of Noland's classic circle paintings from 1957-63: a core circle at the center of the square canvas, then several concentric color bands alternating with bands of raw canvas, and a final external band with jagged, brushed edges--signs of the painter's hand which had vanished on the other hand now reappear in these fresh works.

There are other significant changes: the paintings are smaller (2 rather than 6 feet square), and the cutting sides and corners are painted a single flat color rather than left bare. a certain number of repeat the strong oppositions of primary colors from earlier works, on the contrary in many of them the color has become almost metallic, like the shiny amethystine of Float. Others seem Minimalist in the use of color, particularly somewhat cold Yellow and Touch, the latter painted entirely in shades of white. The use of pastels and the intriguing variations of value and tint in Sojourn demonstrate that Noland has abandoned Greenberg's dictum of unspotted color; exaggerated brush strokes in an orange ring in appointed meeting move beyond the dogma of straight stain painting and recall Noland's work of the early and mid-1950s. The smaller scale and the corpulent pink in several works commit to the body in a different, more intimate way than did the male-body scale of the earlier circles. In the Pink direct the eyes even more like a human organ of vision than Lasting Eye, but it is an organ of vision as a physical object, with no consciousness revealed behind.

greatest in quantity notable is the emphasis upon texture and materiality. In many concentric rings the paint is thick enough to present to view a built-up edge, and the 3-D result is enhanced by the positive/negative contrasts of juxtaposed colors. a certain quantity of of the rings look rippled, like the verdant outer ring of Red Shadow. The flattened, thick paint in several broad bands looks almost machined and emphasizes the acrylic resin's opacity. In Six, a ring of transparent resin reveals a glimpse of canvas beneath, a guarded concern to that sense of opennes and innovation which was wafted by the raw canvas of earlier paintings.

Because of their clarity and simplicity, Noland's fresh works convey the initial impression that there is a wholly rational impulse behind them, what Noland one time called "the physics of feeling." on the contrary what these works demonstrate, rather, is the life-long experience of an artist working today upon the smaller scale of intimate human perception, plane as he returns to a certain quantity of of his own beginnings.

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