BY EMMANUEL J. PETIT
I was taught as an art student that it
was taboo to articulate the center of the
painting in too strong a way. The center
was a position in the canvas that didn't
want to be made too perceptually
obvious. As I began to become involved
with Mondrian's aesthetics of NeoPlasticism, I took that as a challenge. I
tried to treat the geographic center of the
painting as at once independent of its
surroundings and part of the
composition. Yet my painting is less
about an opposition between center and
periphery than an enactment of the
Source Hollandays, 1958/74
perceptual forces of push and pull. In an
early painting I did, called Source
Hollandays, the center of the canvas is occupied by a red square. But because this
shape immediately associates with its neighboring forms in different ways, the center
ceases to read as a center, and the eye engages in a multitude of relationships in
time. The black and white element brings the same idea into many other paintings of
mine. This idea has stayed with me a long time, through most of my paintings of the
1970s, '80s, and '90s, and eventually it has become a kind of signature. I suppose it is
an unconscious homage to one of my teachers, Josef Albers, to whom the center of
the canvas was very essential in his exploration of the square.
The central black and white element
denotes the ideal condition of
complementarity, one of the major
themes that runs through my work. More
metaphorically, it can be perceived as a
window of light and darkness. The white
is a field of light that seems to emanate
from behind the curtains of color to
expose the rear plane of the
composition. The black, on the other
hand, is an absence of light. It can be
read as a tear in the fabric, a black hole
that absorbs the light. So it has a kind of
metaphysical presence.
Untitled no. 3, 1976
the very top of this spheroid is white, at the bottom black. The poles are connected by
a spinal column of stepped grays, with middle gray residing on the "equator." The gray
steps are designated as values. Light emerges both in the differential between values
and in contiguous color relationships.
The color, value, and geometry of the
painting therefore feed back into each
other. This interaction is worked out in
the actual process of painting, the
proposition of which is constantly
changing. I start many of my paintings
with an initial sketch in which I notate
color within shape. I transpose the
sketch onto the canvas in a very thin,
tenuous, and watery way. I then begin to
alter shape, and a dance or duet
between drawing and color guides the
painting. I like to think of color as
something contained in jars and tubes,
to be released at the appropriate time,
Chromeclusters, 1974
when the spatial structure calls for it.
Color and drawing enter into a pas de
deux, and finally each holds its own. Most of the time color generates the idea of the
painting for me through its translation into geometry, its enactment of the three forces
of tension, compression, and shear, the primary elements of Neo-Plastic painting.
Mondrian articulated the aesthetics of
Neo-Plasticism as a doctrine. He
organized the canvas with nothing but
horizontal and vertical geometries and
used only a limited palette, all primaries.
He insisted on this, and when Van
Doesburg introduced diagonals in his own
compositions, the two stopped speaking.
It was a very dogmatic movement in
Holland! But what I admire in Mondrian is
not just the rigor of his Neo-Plastic
sensibility, but his stamina, his patience,
his search to enrich his own aesthetic
structures. When Mondrian came to the
United States in the early 1940s, he got
Guadaloupe Boogie-Woogie, 1956
turned on to the energies of New York
City, as you can feel for example in his
painting Broadway Boogie Woogie. The amount of spatial ambiguity and syncopation
is incredible. The painting is very polyphonic. You can almost hear the painting in all
its complexity. At first, Mondrian's paintings disturbed me a lot. I didnt like them so
much as a teenager. But when I began studying painting and drawing more seriously, I
saw their virtues. My discovery of his unfinished masterpiece, Victory Boogie-Woogie,
a square turned forty-five degrees into a diamond, was a major revelation, which in turn
triggered my acceptance of Neo-Plastic aesthetics.
So I developed a style of painting with
clear Neo-Plastic references. This goes
back to my three years at Yale in the
first half of the 1950s. Rather perversely,
given the strong influence of Josef Albers
there, I chose to restrict my palette to
Mondrian's primaries. Only in the early
'60s did I begin to accept the totality of
color.
While I was an art student at Yale I read
a lot of Gestalt psychology and got
acquainted with its terminology: figure
ground, figurefield, constellation,
Study, 195354
Untitled, 1994
Untitled, 1986
Untitled, 1996
City, 1992
Untitled, 1963
Slapstick, 2001