The Message of Painting
Barry Schwabsky

I’ve been following Ross Neher’s work closely for more than twenty years. In the ‘80s, when we used to argue in Fanelli’s—these days the arguments take place elsewhere—his paintings were abstract and painterly. So I was surprised when, sometime early on in our acquaintance, he showed me a few examples of work from earlier on in his career and some of these turned out to be abstractions of a more hard-edged, linear sort (even more surprised than I was to learn that he had had a representational phase, because if you go back far enough, most painters do). And sometime around ten years ago, he surprised me again, with a new revision of his painting style. In 1994, reviewing in Artforum his show toward the end of the previous year at David Beitzel Gallery, what seemed most salient in his paintings—why else would it have been the first thing I mentioned?—was their way of “translating broad sweeps of atmospheric space and light into densely corporeal surfaces.” Perhaps I’d put it differently now, saying that the space was nebulous but the surface concrete, a synthesis maintained by a poignant way with light.

            Between the paintings in that show—the ones I cited as the best ones at the time being Femme, Adagietto, and Largo, all from 1993—and those he exhibited in his next one-man show, at Howard Scott M-13 Gallery in early 1997, came something I was happy to call (in a review for a short-lived, determinedly local New York publication called Review) a “breakthrough.” Actually, Review deserves a brief digression. This was a grassroots, DIY, picture-free magazine of nothing but exhibition reviews done quickly so that they could appear while the shows being discussed were still on view. And its editor took a resolutely hands-off approach to his job, letting his contributors write whatever they wanted without revising it in any way—thus allowing for a good deal of sloppy, self-indulgent prose, I’m afraid—but also letting them write about whatever they saw fit to write about, no matter if other reviewers had a mind to write about the same thing. Nothing was “assigned” to anyone, nothing was commissioned, and if that meant an issue ended up with two reviews of the same show, each with a diametrically opposed viewpoint, so be it. But I don’t think what happened with the February 17, 1997 issue of Review had ever happened before, nor did it happen again thereafter: Imagine my surprise when I first opened a copy of that issue to discover, not one, but four other reviews of Neher’s show—each of them, in its own way, if I remember correctly, praising Neher’s new paintings as warmly as I did, each of them finding in his new paintings a sort of breakthrough. This was astonishing to me: Here were the independent voices of a cross-section of critics, all of them in agreement about the surprise and power of these new paintings.

            What had happened in between the 1993 paintings I had admired and these newer ones that absolutely floored me was a visit to Italy. That aesthete’s euphoria popularly known as the Stendhal Syndrome—it’s even supplied the title and a basic plot device to one of Dario Argento’s cult exploitation films starring his daughter Asia—is normally even more deleterious to a painter’s work than to the health of the ordinary art lover, its effects in the first instance being longer lasting. Dizziness, an accelerated heartbeat, and the occasional hallucination are transient symptoms, but an obsession with making the surface of a painting as seductively beautiful as that of a 500-year-old wall has sometimes proven incurable. Luckily, Neher turned out to be one of those strong spirits who could breathe the air of painting’s homeland without being overwhelmed by it. And yet the experience did have an immediate and dramatic sequel in his art. Shortly after his return to New York he began planning a new painting that would be to all appearances quite different from his work of the last several years, the massive (6’ x 9’) Palazzo dei Consoli, 1994, a crisply stylized but fundamentally accurate depiction of the 14th century architectural wonder—possibly the work of a local master, Matteo di Giovanello, called il Gattapone—on the piazza della Signoria in Gubbio, formerly the seat of the Umbrian town’s government and now a museum.

            Palazzo dei Consoli was not exhibited in the 1997 show, but it was the seed for the paintings that were in it—and indirectly for all of Neher’s paintings since then. At the same time, much in it would find no place in Neher’s subsequent work, most evidently its frankly representational nature. It’s called Palazzo dei Consoli and that’s what it shows—although, one might add, the viewer is equally impressed by the vast and empty piazza (which almost every guidebook and website on Gubbio describes as “windswept”). One can hardly help mention the metaphysical period of Giorgio de Chirico—compare his 1913 painting The Red Tower, in the Guggenheim collection: Like Palazzo dei Consoli, the building that gives de Chirico’s painting its title is not in the foreground, but looms in the distance; with the scene depicted from a low vantage point, it is the piazza before it that takes up nearly the entire bottom half of the painting. Both paintings, as well, possess a clear, blunt, nearly geometrical structure, though that of The Red Tower is symmetrical whereas that of Palazzo dei Consoli is not. (In the latter, it is not the building as a whole, but rather its spindle-slender campanile on which the composition is centered.) Most important of all the many differences between the two paintings—aside from scale, of course—is that whereas de Chirico’s painting is prominently occupied by shadow, Neher’s is characterized by the searing intensity of its light. There is something very peculiar about this light, as I recall it: The light evoked by the painting is pitiless, amounting to an almost unbearable glare such as one might imagine in such an exposed place as the piazza della Signoria at midday in the Italian summer—and yet the light experienced by the viewer of the painting is much gentler, almost mellow in its preternatural evenness. De Chirico wrote of the relation between a work of art and the reality that provoked it that “one resembles the other, but in a strange way, like the resemblance there is between two brothers, or rather between the image of someone we know seen in a dream, and that person in reality; it is, and at the same time it is not, that same person; it is as if there had been a slight transfiguration of the features.” When the resemblance and therefore the transfiguration are as patent as it is between the Palazzo dei Consoli and Neher’s Palazzo dei Consoli, then the discrepancy itself may be a source of disquiet.

            In the paintings that followed, Neher opted for a greater divergence from the source of his inspiration. In fact, those paintings, the ones in his 1997 show, can no longer be considered representational. Does that mean they are therefore abstract? I’m not sure. There is still the ghost of a resemblance in the paintings, although all evidence of the palazzo itself has vanished. What remains is an evocation of the space of the piazza. As the painter himself wrote at the time, “This resulted in a linear structure where three diagonals meet at the vanishing point. By choosing to make the fourth line horizontal, the funneling effect of deep perspectival space is softened.” Neher made an abstraction of the piazza, analyzing it into geometrically defined areas, but the emphasis was not on these geometrical divisions; instead, what Neher himself in the same statement called “subtle chromatic shifts” within each broad color area—rather than the flat, undifferentiated, single color typical of that tradition within abstraction which is ordinarily referred to as “geometrical”—draw attention away from the edges where the color areas meet so that “one sees the painting as a whole and, then, as the eyes adjust, the internal structure.”

            This effect of a slowly emergent internal structure has numerous precedents in modernism, but of course the first comparison one thinks of is none other than the “black paintings” of Ad Reinhardt. For this reason, the inherent differences should be pointed out: Reinhardt’s paintings were square, within internal structure of nine equal squares: The temporal structure of gradual revealment is contradicted by a spatial structure that is entirely static; whereas Neher’s spatial structure, defined by diagonals as well as the horizontal and vertical, and with areas of different shapes and areas, creates a composition that is relatively subdued and harmonious yet not entirely inert; and of course the fact that the colors within the defined areas contain their own gradual shifts, adds to the effect of a temporal factor within the paintings, in which slowness is still understood as a form of movement, of change, rather than an approximation of stasis. And then of course there is the question of color. In his book Blindfolding the Muse, Neher treats Reinhardt with some severity, aptly quoting from the latter’s essay “Black a Symbol and as Concept” the pronouncement that “black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.” Taking Reinhardt at his word, the slight variations in tone of the blacks he used in his painting would not be there to make black known as a color but, on the contrary, would rather represent the minimum degree of color necessary in order to point toward black as color’s absolute negation. Well, I’m not entirely sure I’m ready to take Reinhardt at his word; my own recollection of the experience of his black paintings is not exactly that, as Neher puts it, they “do not so much create light as extinguish it.” In order to extinguish it they first conjure it, and it is for each viewer to decide, perhaps irrespective of the artist’s claims, whether light’s extinction cancels out its creation or not. In any case, the fact that Neher was able so successfully to adapt a device previously cultivated by Reinhardt for such incompatible reasons suggests that Reinhardt had not entirely taken the measure of this device; and I can think of no painter who developed the idea of a gradually revealed internal structure as deeply as Neher did in his paintings of the mid- and late ‘90s, in which (as remains true of his work today) light and color are the alpha and omega.

            In his paintings of the present decade (grouped under the general heading, Sforza, after the Castello Sforzesco in Milan), Neher has retained much of what was salient to the works based on the image of the piazza della Signoria—nearly everything, one might say, but the piazza: There is the division of the picture space into geometrically defined units by means of both diagonal and perpendicular lines; the use of subtly graded color within a given geometrical area; and an avoidance of direct depiction allied to a complete willingness to evoke real space—visible, haptic, experiential—and its architectural context. But whereas Neher was earlier concerned to “soften” the effects of perspective, now he uses perspective more forthrightly. And yet, surprisingly he uses it, not to construct deep space—no vast receding piazzas here, remember—but to reconstruct, on a different basis, something like that shallow, faceted space we are most likely to associate with Cubism and its derivates. And yet, how shallow? As we’ll see, the initial impression of a shallow space will prove impossible to bear out. There may after all be a deep space in these paintings, though not one constructed through perspective—but more of that later. Each of the recent paintings is divided into several rectangular areas, but then each of these is subdivided into five sections: a central rectangle, echoing the outer one that contains it, framed by four trapezoids; in essence, the impression the paintings give is of an irregularly coffered surface with chamfered rectangular units of varying scale. Now, logically, these beveled rectangles should as easily appear to project as to recede—these possibilities should appear indifferently to the eye, which ought to be able to switch back and forth between them at will. But in fact, in my experience, in almost all of the paintings, the chamfers seem to recede, and it takes a concerted perceptual effort to see them as projecting—one clear exception being The Red Zone, 2004, in which the bright red inner rectangles cannot help but project from their blue that surrounds them.

            In using words like “coffer,” “chamfer,” “bevel,” I have already said something about the general area of reference of these forms, and about one’s sense of their scale: Despite the heroic size of some of the paintings—The Red Zone is nine feet wide; Sforza I, 2003, nearly twelve; Sforza II, 2007, is an expanse of over sixteen feet—and the formal grandeur of all of them, these are not paintings that directly evoke the scale of a city, as Palazzo dei Consoli and its immediate successors did. They still refer to architecture, to be sure, but now to the architectural detail—to the ornamentation of walls and of imposing furnishings, things of human rather than of civic scale. And for this reason, the presumed distance between recessed planes of the paintings and their forward planes must be estimated in inches.

            At least, such is one’s first impression. But as the eye explores the painting, the first impression fades, and other considerations come into play: for instance that, insofar as the paintings are abstract, there really is no key to interpreting their internal scale in terms of any external referent. Their configurations may remind us of coffered surfaces such as one might find in richly decorated rooms but this association holds no special authority over us—the enjoyment of the painting as an abstract color-space entails letting such associations lose their grip over our perception. And what color-spaces! From the austerity of Gray Faro, 2007, to the graphic boldness of Arqua, 2004, from the eerily hot shadows of Study for “Sforza III,” 2005, to the paradoxically nocturnal brilliance of Blue Clarion, 2005, they certainly have little to do with anything one could encounter outside the realm of painting and its most acute inventions. To give oneself over to the enjoyment of these paintings is therefore to allow their shallow spaces their true elasticity, their capacity for an almost endless expansion in the mind’s eye. As one observes this expansion—the paintings’ generous response to the eye’s explorations—there’s another surprise in store: The bottom drops out, one might say, as it becomes less and less tenable to keep seeing what I have called the “recessed planes” as planes at all. For more and more, as one keeps looking, these rectangles of subtly modulated color reveal themselves, not as surface, but as pure space, pure light—immeasurable depth, absolutely unrelated to the relative depths constructed by perspective. Could this perception, perhaps, be the ultimate message of painting?

            One might be tempted to think so, but Neher’s art has never traded in ultimates, just as it’s never traded in the fripperies of style or in stylistic categories: painterly or hard-edged, representational or abstract are secondary to an argument about the nature and possibilities of painting. And I choose the word “argument” advisedly. Neher’s paintings offer luxuriant sensual experience yet they emerge from an ongoing argument with his contemporaries, his precursors (de Chirico, Reinhardt), and above all himself about what painting can be. The message of painting is delivered with a polemical thrust.