10.25.23 — Color as Mass
You can always count on paintings by Sam Gilliam to pop right off the wall. No, scratch that: what comes off the wall is color itself.
He kept at it to the end at that, but with an unexpected closeness to the wall. Work from his last years thickens in the process, defying the lightness of his earlier unstretched canvas, at Pace through October 28. Was he still first and foremost a colorist? 
If you know Gilliam at all, you almost surely know him for curtains across the gallery. Born in 1933, he is forever linked to the Washington Color School (as in the nation’s capital), along with Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis. For Noland or Louis, stain is a matter of design, with clear symmetry and emblematic imagery in targets and veils. For Gilliam, it could be tie-dyed canvas left out to sing or to dry. As with Charles McGill, coming off the wall situates abstraction between painting and sculpture, but which comes first? But then why choose?
That generation did not. Critics in the 1960s loved to talk about “art as object” in the same breath with “flatness,” for painters like Frank Stella. Gilliam might seem to prefer the first, when, after all, a painting literally bars the way. Yet it is color that, first and foremost, pops. He made clear the potential for Southern blacks and black abstraction, but he preferred to talk about color for its own sake. The very lack of design may have left him less visible than Noland, Louis, or (also at times in Washington) Alma Thomas, but there the physical object and its shape have their role as well. What happens, then, when Gilliam sticks to the wall?
For one thing, approaching his death in 2022, it returns him to the epic scale and rectangle of color-field painting. At the same time, the plot thickens. Paint itself does, heavily clotted to the point that color emerges both as image and highlight. Most of the paintings could almost be monochrome, give or take the interruptions. A mostly white painting would look just plain creepy without them, while a blue one would lose its depths of shadow in shades of blue. Store-bought glitter enters as well.
Canvas and its support thicken, too, with beveled edges. These are massive, labor intensive works, an unexpected turn for an older artist. Maybe Gilliam was consciously defying death. He may also have been looking for a greater simplicity after the stains. A smaller back room holds another late series—smaller, flatter, and still closer to the wall. There colors overlap and descend like lightening, as if to show that he, too, could paint. Out front, though, color comes down to the beveled rectangle.
Clotting and glitter can make anyone cringe. Signs of mass and effort in an older artist can make anyone wonder what he himself really did. They do, though, what big paintings are supposed to do: they take time and demand attention. Think of them as just another way to make color pop. It may take mass to produce color and color to produce mass.
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