Recently I received notice that my work would not be included in an exhibition about the monochrome. I regretted that I was not allowed to submit a statement with my work. Had I been allowed, I would have included the following.
The monochrome is generally understood to be the uniform painting of a canvas in only one color. This circumstance is one of the most significant pictorial structures in modernity because of the frequency with which it is used and the challenges it presents. Its reappearances (and disappearances) at different junctures in the last one hundred years challenge us to reconsider history. First and foremost, the monochrome disrupts the notion that modernity is an endlessly innovative succession of pictorial styles. The monochrome's insistence makes it more difficult to tell a linear history that runs from Impressionism to Post-Minimalism. Its prominent role in so many art historical movements suggests that the monochrome is a point to which history frequently returns.
The monochrome also poses a challenge to various popular understanding of painting. It offers little opportunity to read painting in aesthetic terms of composition and balance because it eliminates the relationships necessary for such a reading. Because no distinctive lines, forms or marks appear in a monochrome painting, there is very little to compose within the boundaries of the work itself. The monochrome also frustrates viewers who look for meaning in the images of painting. The painting's surface offers nothing in this regard but the basic materiality of the canvas and paint. It leaves us no choice but to focus our attention on the material limits of the work or to walk away.
In my view, the boredom and frustration many people feel when the face a monochrome painting is not its chief drawback. A more serious charge is that it back painting into a corner structurally speaking. The uniform treatment of a canvas in only one color is an extreme limit for painting. It is not by accident that most artists associate the monochrome with absolutist intentions and final solutions. To push further is usually to move outside painting as Yves Klein did. To remain at this limit is to endlessly repeat the format.
I negotiate the monochrome's dilemma by building on its structural advantages. At the same time, my work insists on confronting the central predicament of the monochrome without inhabiting the same structural dead end it occupies. This confrontation must occur within painting because it is a problem that arises from painting. I do so by using processes that treat surfaces uniformly while accounting for other dynamics that are determinative of painting. These dynamics open painting to its many reserves--conditions necessary to its being but otherwise invisible--by exposing the contingencies of its circumstance.
In Four, I engage this using a gouache mixture of primary colors that inevitably turn to gray when mixed and applied to the canvas. Gray extends across the surface until it intersects the tape attaching the work to the wall. When the tape is removed it reveals blue paint, nearly identical in color. This substitution plays on the absence of the tape while simultaneously presenting its color.
My work in oil invokes the monochrome using different processes in order to emphasize painting's contingencies in other ways. Uniform surface treatment is arrived at through a low fidelity printing process that combines red, yellow and blue paint. As in Untitled, a final coat of paint whose color matches the canvas is applied over the mixture of primary colors. This layer, along with the removal of the tape from the surface of the canvas, reduces our ability to differentiate between color and material, canvas and paint and background and foreground. In contrast with earlier monochromes, which render the underlying canvas invisible by covering it with paint, my works expose and are exposed by the canvas.
The lesson of the monochrome offers my work a way to continue as painting from a historical, formal and theoretical point of painting's limit. The recognition of the specific limit the monochrome presents, combined with a full concern for painting's other limits and contingencies, makes manifest normally invisible reserves and links them to the visible signs of painting. Such a commitment provides an occasion to reconsider the art of modernity as so many returns to and advances from a kind of zero point.
