6.13.25 — Symmetry Breaking
Remember geometric abstraction from nearly half a century ago? For Frank Stella, it could take flight like an exotic bird. For Elizabeth Murray, shaped canvas could explode into scraps from everyday life. It could have the craftsmanship and rigor of Charles Hinman, the casual but vital cool of Richard Tuttle, or the defiance of its own logic of Robert Mangold. For Ellsworth Kelly, it need not even depart from the rectangle.
It might seem newly relevant, now that painting is back, but less as formal exercise than as a hybrid of styles and media. I keep coming back to that hybrid, not solely with shaped canvas and its heirs. I have caught art between painting and sculpture or challenging the opposition between exuberance and geometry. Still other artists, though, are putting geometry through its paces much like Stella, including Don Voisine strictly within the rectangle. Voisine looks that much more provocative a decade later. His art does not need shaped canvas to reshape the rectangle.
And Voisine is getting messier. It may seem like sacrilege coming from one of the cleanest painters in town. Few have shown off as well how much energy a design can acquire just by cleaning up its act. Voisine keeps returning to diamonds, rectangles, and squares, framing them carefully with color, with the spotlight on the image center. Sound boring? You got tired of that, I know, in the 1960s, when what you see is what you got. For him, though, symmetry is itself the key to symmetry breaking. And I wrap this together with an earlier review of Voisine’s geometric abstraction as a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.
When Voisine showed exactly ten years ago, he brought to mind the shaped canvas of Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray in the 1960s, without once departing from the rectangle. He evoked Stella’s Irregular Polygons without the least irregularity. All it took was oil on panel, with plenty of blue, black, and white. Setting familiar shapes on their side, in concatenation, and treating some as accents converted triangles into arrows in space. Framing strips of a single color at top and bottom absorbed their pressure. It brought out the Neo in New York Neo-Geo.
Now he all but gives up the balance, but not altogether the symmetry, at McKenzie through June 29. This is his self-conscious revision, as “enact/re(d)act.” The borders remain, as notably broad as ever, anchoring the whole. They retain their unusual colors as well, including maroon and orange. Some are off-white, with a tempting translucency, making them thicker for the eye to penetrate. Squares may gather that much further to the center of a composition, as diamonds.
Titles suggest a combination of playfulness and restraint. You are at Poolside for the summer, with a Quip. This is Tranquil but Shearing all the way Through. Juxtapositions play a greater role throughout. Triangles become taller, slimmer, and slightly tilted, like metronomes in motion. Variations on black itself come into juxtaposition, challenging you to decide whether in fact they differ.
You could end up thinking that he has ruined the whole show, and he could be fine with that, too. Such are the risks of abstraction. Such, too, 
is the virtuosity of opaque color and translucent black. I could not say myself whether he had put his past to rest or built on it splendidly, but I spent a long time enjoying the effects. Besides, Stella has long since made a mess of the whole painterly show himself. Still, the focus is on clarity, in sorting out a thinner rectangle or a thicker X.
There is, as ever, plenty of decent abstraction out there. Take your pick. Not all of it need be woven, as a textile. Erika Ranee applies broad brushwork on a large scale, a mix of flatness and drips, predominantly red, in what could almost pass for Franz Kline redux, at Klaus von Nichtssagend through July 11. She calls it “My Saturn Return,” a reference to astrology that I could live without. Still, she means it to highlight an act of at once transformation and renewal, and many an abstract painter could say the same.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.