Viewing page 33 of 80

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Kenneth Noland              P. 2

on this hand or figurative associations on the other.

Noland's paintings do not give up their secrets easily. Their spareness and blandness mask their true voluptuosity, and they often depend on ambiguities which enforce a deliberative contemplation more exacting than the simplicity of the forms would seem to require. The tightest and most rigorous of his images are often virtually incapable of visual and psychological resolution.  Their ambivalence must be regarded not as resistance to the encounter with the beholder, but as an affirmation of complexity and enrichment as a mode of experience as well as of art.  Noland's paintings become for him then a statement of his positive feelings about experience and about life, and about art as a vehicle for these feelings.  His absorption in edges, which may be feathery and indeterminate, despite their circular reference, or crisp and positive, but never hard, the spatial complexity and planimetric sonority generated by his color, which may be opaque or stained into the canvas, the hypnotic precision of concentration or the echoing resonance toward the limits of the field, the ponderosities or the soaring effects, the sobriety or the lyricism all these embrace the whole range of paradoxical richness.  Noland, with several of his contemporaries, has helped to bring about a new abstract art, concerned less with formal exposition than with a new expressive language of great density which comes closer to a pure statement of the real basis of human feeling, or the intricacy, the ambiguity and the indeterminacy of experience, than has perhaps ever been achieved before in art.

Alan R. Solomon