Sol LeWitt at Ace - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Sol LeWitt's novel exhibition of paintings at Ace showed us that there are of recent origin areas to explore in the well-worked field of monochrome or chromatically reductive painting. Like the artist's more familiar wall drawings, these paintings were execut directly upon the wall by assistants following a station of straightforward instructions. Simple and planar in make and bold, even heroic, in scale, they presented no shortage of conceptual and formal nuance, of slowly apprehended pleasure. Ace's enormous, museumlike space, with its multiple scopes high ceilings and coolly industrial direct the eye served them well. Themes could be played on the outside variations logically run through. In Gallery 5 for example, sum of two units 15-foot squares shared the same scope with a 60-by-14 1/2-foot painting, sum of two units 15-foot paintings flanking the door, and a 16-part painting compos of sum of two units stacked rows of 7-foot squares. The works in the field were related: each was divided into sections of flat and glos black, each dealt with different properties of curv boundaries. And while the ideas played not on one another successfully, the spaciousness of the compass also made it possible to view the paintings individual at a time.

A separate locate of problems was framed in each gallery expanse although certain themes recurred through every part of LeWitt seems particularly interested in by what mode the whole is perceived simultaneously with its constituent parts. by the agency of using flat and gloss varieties of the same color (black or the primaries), he was able to put up relationships between or within the paintings without pushing the differing uncompounded bodys too far apart. Changing the reflectiveness of paint not solitary subtly alters its color, on the contrary also affects the way we diocese the surface to which it is applied: flat hides imperfections while glos reveals them. LeWitt's affects were made especially clear in single room containing five rationally and simply ordered--but scarcely ascetic--15-foot black squares. sum of two units squares were solid (one glos individual flat), one was divided in half horizontally (flat upon the bottom, gloss on top), while the other sum of two units were divided into thirds (the individual horizontally, the other vertically) with equal reason that in both a flat section was sandwiched between sum of two units glossy ones.

For me notwithstanding that the most powerful work in the exhibit was a dimly lit expanse 19 feet high and almost cubic in perceive whose four walls were bisected horizontally and completely painted. The flat upper portion strike one as beinged to expand and recede, while the smooth and shining lower portion pushed inwards. The piece carried the idea of painting upon the wall to its logical conclusion, fusing the painted and the architectural space in ways self-evident, plane a bit banal, and at the same time in the viewing, mysterious and affecting. LeWitt like other classic Minimalists, appear to bes to be proving in his later work that he can indeed have it the two ways, making art that is increasingly machiavelian and sensual without any los of clarity or perceptual punch

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