The standard account of Minimalism in the United States is that artists inevitably gravitated toward a kind of visual matter-of-factness. Frank Stella summed up this account succinctly in his famous dictum “what you see is what you see”. The work that he and other well-known artists produced frequently had a blunt, materiological emphasis. This emphasis derived largely from a reading of Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists that accepted their material foregrounding while rejecting their mythologizing and psychologizing.
Simon Hantaï’s recent show at the Paul Kasmin Gallery included paintings that were made during the heyday of American Minimalism. These paintings share a concern for Pollock as well as a materiological emphasis with American Minimalism but the similarities end there. Where Stella insisted on a kind of visual positivism, Hantaï’s work speaks to a nearly inverse perspective. Before reflecting on this perspective, some background helps contextualize his work.
Considered a master in France, Hantaï is not well known in the United States. His work has not been exhibited in this country since 2001, though that’s the least of the reasons why he is not in the public eye. With a working process that included refusing to exhibit, burying his work in the ground and claiming to have ceased painting, it’s no wonder he proves obscure.
Hantaï’s peculiar working methods gained coherence from a single material process he repeated from 1960 to his death in 2008: the fold. In spite of its repeated use, it never grows tiresome or appears as a gimmick in the twelve paintings on view. The selection almost functions as a mini-retrospective by showcasing an impressive variety of folds employed over the last fifty years. A serious simplicity that borders on unselfconscious austerity resulted from these efforts and each painting appears unique and feels like a necessary exposition.
A brief overview of the process further develops what is at stake in this work. During the painting process the fold causes a portion of the canvas to remain unpainted while the rest is generally covered in a single color. The canvas is then unfurled and stretched, revealing its unpainted ground. No effort is made to hide this process from the viewer; the canvases still bear all the evidence, including creases and paint that has sometimes seeped into the fold. Two later works also contain sutures. They were cut away from larger works and sewn to other canvases before being restretched.
What may sound unbearably dull in writing is revelatory in the presence of the work. The exposure of the gessoed ground, which Hantaï identified as one of the many invisible structures of painting, offers the viewer a paradox: How can something that communicates primarily through the eyes present the invisible? Hantaï’s work suggests not only that painting is capable but particularly well suited to the task. Given such a concern for the invisible, the unusual practices of Simon Hantaï develop a coherence completely absent from American Minimalism. Not of “what you see is what you see” but of seeing the unseen.
