Ellsworth Kelly: The Sky’s The Limit – Peter Lucas

Ellsworth Kelly: The Sky’s The Limit

Peter Lucas

When I saw him at the Tate ten years ago, Kelly’s mixture of hard- and soft-edged oblong, concave and oval canvases told their own tale. No plush leather benches had been supplied for horizontal observation. The rooms were functional and the lighting was bright. In fact, the overall brightness of the space and the work was such that, after several moments of viewing, upon closing one’s eyes, his shapes still seemed to snake freely across the walls: they seemed to cut loose not just from their form but also from the viewer’s eyes. Years later, in the long room at MoMa that held "Sculpture for a Large Wall," there were an infinite number of potential viewing options. Each of his 104 aluminum panels held their color and space at varied angles to each other and, from a distance, shone light and dark within and behind, creating another wall of movement. Last summer at the Drawing Center, I surveyed with incredulity the collection of 188 scraps of paper, card and other objects that Kelly had scrawled or outlined his thoughts and ideas on before they manifested into his canvases (or were ditched along the way). Here was not only a complete record of moments, albeit in their original torn, random and transitory forms—a corner of a newspaper with a phone number, doodles on notepaper, a received invitation—but also a chronological record of a parallel universe. Some of those moments were destined remain half-thoughts, there and gone. Others were proto-paintings, already realized, waiting merely for canvases to spill onto.

An entire half century of exhibitions have not lessened the shock or pleasure of Kelly’s bold merger of his own brand of minimalism and the Modernism he observed in Paris in the early 1950s. "Red Green Blue: Paintings and Studies 1958-1965," now showing in New York, spotlights Kelly’s work at precisely this point. His canvases began to use three-dimensional panels; his colors grew bolder and sharper and, slyly, also more Pop, more American. The hard edges of Kelly’s craft—his colored rectangles, triangles and rhomboids—were juxtaposed more and more against each other. Then, effortlessly, they glided toward the ceiling and beyond, in our imaginations. Alas, the real world is still trying to catch up.