five notes on ryman from 80 to 89



a) a few return returns to the black or red fields of his younger work, so it's white on white on black or white on white on red--but he uses enamelc or latex so the colour is only visible on the edges. in a similar way, some of the later work rebels against flatness--so he has a flat surface of some transparency (say wax paper) and then a flat shiny surface (say latex) and then a set of visible, off white paint strokes, that have an explicit texture--and this texture is set on the edges.

b) some of it uses the colour of armature (the black of bolts, the tan or beige of frames, the silver of screws, the yellow/grey of fiberglass) in terribly promient ways--so they become a formal way of completely working against what he had done for the previours 30 years. sometimes they even have holes drilled straight in them.

c) some work is literally split in two--where the armature is visible as a straight line, or like the visble, slightly smaller space between two sperate fields,. and in one work credential from 1985, not only is the middle section smaller then the lower and upper fields, it is a different colour, and it is slightly recessed. (which reminds me of late 60s jack bush paintings--where much of the work is floating lines or colour on a overpainted field, but the field is painted until a few cm from the edge, so the raw canvas shows thru, there is something incredibly powerful about the absence there)

d) which reminds of how much i like the gaps in his painting--the places where work is not painted, the middle absences, the edges of some kind of rawness.

e) much of them are really glossy--what is it with tight, theoritical, often conceptual painters getting weirdly brassy or glossy in the 80s--was it a market thing?