Monochrome paintings are often derided as an elitist and difficult form of art. For this reason it’s worth considering them in light of two analog experiences that are widely relatable. The first analog is visual and the second is textual. Both merit brief reflection because they provide constructive contexts that can be easily overlooked.
Monochromes are like windows at construction sites marked with blue painters tape. Attaching tape to a window changes it from invisible to visible, ensuring that no one will overlook it.
The second analog, a textual one, is familiar to anyone who has filled out paperwork from a large bureaucracy (government office, hospital or university). Frequently, these forms include the text “This space intentionally left blank,” creating a kind of space that is not a space within the form.
Taken together, these analogs offer a view of the monochrome as a visible, but unfigured painting.
The application of paint to a surface renders it visible as painting in much the same way that tape on a window registers the glass within a construction site. The paint marks and covers the canvas rendering two distinctive materials under a single name: painting. To borrow the late curator Kirk Varnedoe’s title from his book about abstract art this creates a “picture of nothing". This picture of nothing is the same as the space intentionally left blank from the text of the paperwork.
It is really not even a picture but the simple insistence of a complex set of circumstances. In painting a monochrome, the artist chooses as little as possible. In the most extreme cases there are only three choices: the support, the paint and a tool for application. Through a lack of choosing the artist is attempting to reach a liminal space in which the work accounts for the complete totality of its circumstance. It refuses to distract the viewer from the basic problem (why is there something rather than nothing) through complex choices and virtuoso technique. It nearly reverses Varnedoe’s formulation—“picture of nothing”—to nothing to picture. There is nothing to picture because there is no longer any authority or hierarchy of images that guarantee us the image of painting. The collapse of this authority means that there is no one to sanction an image as painting.
The monochrome, then, perhaps more than any other modern pictorial construct, registers our doubt. It is an ethical possibility, in a field of expressive posturing and bravado, because it humbly exposes our unknowing and directionlessness. The creation of a space that is very nearly no space at all ultimately serves as a locus of our uncertainty and our inability to escape the past. This is why it is the starting point for my work.
