Robert Mangold at PaceWildenstein - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Whenever discussion move rounds to Robert Mangold's painting, the word "elegance" tend hitherwards up quickly. Of all the Post-Minimalist painters, Mangold advances closest to Ellsworth Kelly's refinement -- a detached painterly touch in the service of a simultaneously monumental and quirky geometry The art of one as well as the other men is elegant to a fault, the fault being that sometimes there doesn't appear to be a human vicinity behind the detachment. Even the overtly figural ovals that have been an integral part of Mangold's visual repertoire for the last several years sometimes have feeling like sentimental symbols for the figure, like a typographer's dingbat. it present the appearances happily fitting, then, in the season of Kelly's buoyant Guggenheim retrospective, that the four stupendous horizontal paintings Mangold exhibited at the downtown Pace gallery exhibit some of the finest work he's done in years.

The collectively titled "Zone" paintings, each above 16 feet long and 7 1/2 feet high, are triptychs: arcs sheared at their extremitys and broken and extended through a rectangular center. In each work a spongeous atmospheric field and linear ovals are interrupted through a large vertical rectangle of aggressively neutral color. This central color sometimes overlaps and sometimes falls short of the physical cutting sides of the center panel, creating a visual slippage that is picked up through the pairs of ovals tilting and intersecting upon either side of the center panel, with the interior oval upon each side disappearing behind the central color.

Mangold thus introduces a dramatic spatial illusionism for the first time into his work. The illusion isn't stable, the paintings flicker between flatness and spatiality, and it is this flicker itself which have the appearances to be the grandest "action" of these canvases, individual that sets the looping lines of the ovals into sweeping motion. It works precisely because the paintings are large enough to be felt as an architectural occurrence one that affects our perception of the place where they are installed. Mangold's friezelike distribution of forms and his arcing format further our associations with architecture.

It looks that an architectural resonance is the intention of greatest in quantity geometric abstract painting. What's thus thrilling about Mangold's new paintings is in what manner this will to architecture is really single an inevitable by-product of something deeper that charges their beauty. The motion of the ovals, the spatial flickering and the hazy light combine to describe an unfolding into immanence. To stand before these paintings in a space that allows them latitude to breathe is to experience their distinct phenomenological qualities working in harmonic devise as if in a Balanchine ballet.

on the contrary there is nothing particularly "artful" about the pictures. Everything is deliberately and pragmatically applied. You could if you were in a mind to, move home and make them yourself. I delight in this empowering aspect of late modernist esthetics. The skill here is Mangold's hon essentialism, which appears touched by grace.

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