Light and Dark

"Light and Dark"

by John Yau

introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition

Dorothea Rockburne, New Work: Cut-Ins

December 2, 1989 - January 6, 1990

André Emmerich Gallery

New York, NY

Instead of using geometry to articulate a surface, a plane, or a closed system—a familiar goal in abstract art—Dorothea Rockburne uses it to underscore its own limits, thus evoking a realm that lies beyond its physical boundaries. Depending on one’s philosophical biases, that "realm" has been defined as infinity (the mathematical term) or the ineffable (the religious term). While there are narrative and visual paradigms by which the "ineffable" can be expressed, and abstract signs that stand for "infinity", we cannot directly experience either state. We know only the paradigms or the words.

In Rockburne’s work, the opposite happens. The viewer is actively engaged by the frank luxuriant color and proportional interrelationships of her evocative structures, but cannot arrive at any simple or reductive name for his or her experience of them. This is because her tantalizing configurations—they are neither paintings nor sculptures—do not articulate closed systems or literal limits. Instead, they achieve their visual eloquence by underscoring the dichotomies between chromatic juxtapositions and disrupted interrelationships, between lustrous grounds and sharply angled, planar forms.

Rockburne’s development has never appeared logical or programmatic. She is not a stylist or a problem solver, both of which are responses to predefined limits. Through her use of various means and materials she has intuited what is beyond the limits of language and narrative. It is not surprising then to realize that she is a singular artist whose lustrous transcendent structures defy conventional definitions; and that her ongoing investigation of limits places her in the forefront of abstract artists who have avoided the pitfalls of style, while deflecting notions of closure and the death of the imagination. She has achieved this stature by consistently making an expansive self-sufficient space that calls into question limits, literalness and logic.

II.

In 1970, in her first solo exhibit in New York, Rockburne used such plain materials as cardboard sheets, rolls of paper, crude oil, nails, and graphite powder to explore the nature of light, change, and interlocking relationships. Arranged on both the wall and floor, thus incorporating the specific dimensions of the place into the viewer’s experience, the different materials formed a set of internal interlocking relationships, as well as proposed an external interlocking relationship between itself and the environment. The set’s external relationships revealed the different connections and disruptions uniting and separating body and place.

Rockburne made each element of a set undergo a series of purposeful operations. Paper was rolled and unrolled; cardboard was layered or hung; oil was poured or pressed between two surfaces. These simple actions simultaneously covered and uncovered, altered and preserved an object. The crude oil soaked the cardboard, while the cardboard prevented the oil from spilling. At the same time, the combination resulted in a third "element" whose identity was the result of an uneasy union of the two separate things.

Rockburne used these operations to disclose something further about the nature of identity, as well as discover the dialectical processes they would set in motion. It should also be pointed out that even at this early stage of her career, the artist was focusing her investigations on the phenomenon of light. The rolls of white paper produced one kind of reflection, for example, while the crude oil produced another. By making these and other elements extend their identities into a larger, less static realm, Rockburne was able to define an open-ended system.

III.

After using set theory as the unifying principle for determining the heterogeneity of her operations, Rockburne began zeroing in on the essential identity of her materials. In the first of her breakthrough series, Drawings Which Make Themselves, 1971, she folded thick sheets of paper, underscoring their identity as three-dimensional objects, things unto themselves. The folding caused the paper to change from a passive surface to an internally secure geometric form. By underscoring the paper’s own interior principles, Rockburne made each sheet evolve naturally into a dynamic object.

In a very real sense, the drawings are self-sufficient objects capable of reconfiguring themselves and the space around them. Instead of transforming an object or material, Rockburne exposed its inherent capacity to change itself. This observation, which typifies all of her work, not only evokes a state of constant flux, but it also dissolves the barriers between objects and light. Her work is far more in tune with current theories regarding wave theory and a constantly expanding universe, than with critical views proclaiming the end of painting.

IV.

In the mid ’70’s, Rockburne began the Golden Section Paintings, 1974-1976, a series of shaped canvases based on the ancient Greek theory of proportional interrelationships. Through out history, many well known thinkers have credited the proportions of the Golden Section with various mystical properties. In the 16th century, Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan monk and a famous mathematician who was a friend of Leonardo and Piero della Francesca, wrote a book on the Golden Section called Divina Proportione, 1509. Divided into three parts , Pacioli’s book is based in part on the writings of Piero and contains more than fifty drawings by Leonardo.

Within the terms proposed by Rockburne’s use of the Golden Section, geometry is a system of proportional interrelationships rather than a system of measurements. In this regard, her work parallels Mondrian’s who distilled the grid underlying Cubism to what he called a "dynamic equilibrium" of architectonic balances and chromatic disruptions. By using the irreducibility of proportions as the foundation of their geometry, both Mondrian and Rockburne are able to make their work allude to the figure, as well as to what exists beyond the limits of human knowledge.

Shortly after the Golden Section Paintings, 1974-76, Rockburne completed the series, Egyptian Paintings, 1979-80. Made of gessoed linen which has been tightly glued to its surface, each Egyptian Painting is a flat, rectangular structure consisting of two parts. The interior geometric form fits inside the exterior one as smoothly as a joint in Shaker furniture or stones in the Pyramid. Because their planes are contiguous, the space between them becomes a literal line.

On top of the flat, structural surface, Rockburne has affixed folded geometric sections of gessoed linen. There are triangles within and on top of triangles. Placed base to base, the triangles add up to parallelograms and diamonds. The folding both reveals and hides different planes. Narrow, angular shadows fall from the triangles' edges to the vivid surfaces below. A drawn line reasserts the identity of the interior structure.

A work such as Egyptian Painting: Stele, 1980, is simultaneously shifting and static, serene and suggestive of potential change. The work's sheer physicality evokes the shallow, shadowed space of bas-relief, while the gessoed linen radiates a voluptuously chaste light. In the mind's eye, the viewer folds and unfolds the triangles, sensing what is hidden and how else the boundaries and interrelationships might be reconfigured. A complex set of constantly metamorphosizing interrelationships is set in motion.

Looking back over Rockburne’s career—one that is now more than three decades long—it could be said that she returned to the subject of geometry and light in the Egyptian Paintings, and began an ongoing investigation of such dichotomies as surface and light, structure and plane, nuanced color and transparency, and shadows and lustre. She has gone from incorporating the wall, to constructing bas-relief, to focusing on the mural. Recently she has annexed the wall and painted it indigo; incorporating a luxuriant palette; articulated transparent planes; used gold leaf; tinted and glazed her surfaces. Out of this increasingly expansive, formal language, Rockburne has initiated dichotomies that actively engage the viewer. Seeing becomes a dynamic open-ended process of doing and undoing, connecting and reconnecting. The chromatic complexity of her buoyant planes, their proportional interrelationships and provocative disruptions, are internalized by the viewer.

Rockburne isn’t trying to suppress space or describe a literal plane; she is trying to make a space that is at once imaginative and actual. She isn’t looking for ways to express the static and closed; she is evoking the movement of light, planes, and color through space. Hers is a realm of transparency, interpenetration, and movement—a dissonant place where the desire for wholeness is unabating.

One of the keys to Rockburne’s work is that there is no explicit message encoded within her overlapping, interpenetrating, light filled planes. They are neither comments about the art object nor icons to the ineffable. They manage to accomplish something far more difficult in these grim, materialistic times; they evoke beauty, openness, the usefulness of doubt, and the possibility of creative freedom. Both deeply self critical and wildly assertive, their dynamic realm is riddled with uncertainties, and yet inhabited by imagination and desire.

Rockburne’s formal vocabulary consists of primal things, such as light, surface, and form. Her interlocking, contradictory combinations of light and dark, transparency and shadow, form and bodilessness supercede the social foundations of perception with something far more elemental. Planes become films of light, and they in turn become geometric forms. A swirling state of potentiality has been distilled to the point where every element is able to change itself into something else.

VI.

After limiting herself to a voluptuously chaste realm, so as to explore the subtle shiftings and shadings within, Rockburne started working with watercolor on sheets of folded vellum. Based on the highly detailed hierarchy of angels (for John Milton they are the spirits of divine order), the Angels consist of floating, folded geometric forms. Their vivid colors range from somber blacks and silvers to ecstatic scarlets and sumptuous yellows, while the delicate brushwork varies from striations to sky-like atmospheres. By integrating the folded forms with a wide range of erotic colors, Rockburne was able to articulate a realm where angels- the "messengers"- become overt celebrations heralding, among other things, the beginning of a new era in the artist's development.

It is possible to read the sequence—Golden Section Paintings, Egyptian Paintings, and Angels—as a series of vertical leaps the artist has made, moving initially from the physical to light, and then from light to the imagination. It is as if she has moved from the interior principles governing the body's shape to the body’s light within, to, finally, light’s vivid bodilessness. In each case, the seemingly effortless expansion the artist has been able to make is unexpected and startling.

In the Angels, both the geometric forms and their proportional interrelationships have been ploughed under by a luxuriant palette and a conscious suppression of the rational. Color, which was once used to evoke form, now invades it with disembodied light. This extends to Rockburne’s use of black, a color we tend to think of as pulled down by gravity and the earth. Not since Matisse used black has an artist been able to make it appear so weightless and buoyant.

Rockburne uses color not only to disrupt the interlocking planes, but also to obscure their overall shapes. Different colored planes reveal themselves, while hiding others. Rich, saturated hues are placed beside or, in the case of a folded plane, on top of each other without regard to transitional passages. This highly original integration of color and form is the foundation upon which Rockburne has been able to propose a realm where weightlessness and physical form coexist.

Whereas the Golden Section Paintings suggested that a logical sequence had been used to arrive at internal coherences, the Egyptian Paintings and the Angels are indications of Rockburne’s increasing ability to turn geometry inside out, and assimilate it into a grander, more speculative project. The "angels"—something we think of as remote and even quaint—become planar concatenations of color and desire, the seen and unseen, naming and namelessness.

VII.

Completed shortly after the Angels, Inner Voice, 1983, consists of shaped canvases done in oil on gessoed linen. The painting’s center is anchored by a tilting square made of different colored planes. Two monochromatic, sharply angled triangles—one on the top left and the other on the bottom right- extend from the square like vertically thrust wings, thus stabilizing the tilt while adding their own particular torque to the overall configuration. Some of the planes describe what is beneath them, while others seem to be extending out of an unseen realm. Congruities and incongruities are made to dance around each other, thus absorbing doubt into the identity of the painting.

Rockburne does not reduce her "inner voice" to a single speaker, tone, or message. Instead, a non-ironic ambiguity—one could also call it a mystery is articulated. By using geometry and color to dissolve the boundaries between figure and ground, Rockburne had been able to make her resolutely non-objective art continue to discover what lies beyond a frontier first reached by Pollock. That she has approached this from such a different direction, while fully assimilating such disparate precedents as the Golden Section, Pascal, Pontormo, Matisse, Mondrian, and her perceptions of light, is a testimony to not only the variousness of her resources but also to the fact that recondite history can and will still yield a rich trove of possibilities to the intrepid searcher.

Concerned with internal principles and the nature of limits, Rockburne’s art calls into question all that has been said about what abstract art can and cannot do. She doesn’t use geometry to answer questions, but to rhyme the personal with the archetypal.

VIII.

Between 1983 and 1985, Rockburne loosened the colors from the forms even further. In Two Angels, 100 Years, 1984, the planar forms have become transparent membranes through which light and other forms effortlessly pass. By making a color rise off of one plane and through another, the artist is able to delineate a three dimensional, post-cubist space ruled by impetuousness and daring. A highly formal alphabet is developed into a self-contained imaginative language.

Rockburne’s use of color and her cutting into space have their strongest formal precedents in the work of the16th century mannerist painter, Pontormo. His elongated figures cut into the space around them, while his disquieting chromatic juxtapositions are, according to an interview Rockburne once gave, the result of his understanding of nature and color combinations that can occur in fields of flowers. Instead of using Pontormo as someone reacting against Classical art, Rockburne sees him as an artist looking for and finding intimations of a deeper order.

This view, one that is at odds with those developed and codified by art historians, suggests much about Rockburne’s own work. Among other things, she believes in a deeper pattern of order than the ones that are immediately visible to us. This pattern—one sees it in the Golden Section—is more than something to discover; it is a foundation that provides the artist with a way to investigate such dichotomies as light and dark, fact and doubt, the immaterial and material. It isn’t a stopping point, but a way to enter another realm of possibilities.

IX.

Between 1985 and 1987, Rockburne initiated a deeper investigation of the realm where faith and doubt, light and dark, circle each other. Full of elusive possibilities and inherent contradictions, the individually titled paintings were exhibited under the thematic title Pascal and Other Concerns. Mounted on indigo walls, the overlapping and abutting geometric form— their gessoed grounds have been delicately brushed with directional films, faceted with gold leaf, or tinted with sumptuous hues—became transmitters of what must be called, for lack of a better word, sacred light. Everything in these work— the sharp edged forms, transparent planes, lustrous films, warm shadows—cuts into each other. And these expansions, contradictions, and disruptions never happen in some frantic or external way, but occur as gracefully and naturally as atoms in charged field. Rockburne embraces entropy by making it an integral aspect of her work.

Like Pontormo, the 17th century philosopher and mathematician, Pascal, is, for Rockburne, a figure full of contemporary relevance. A child prodigy and auto-didact, he re-invented the principles of Euclid’s theorems at the age of 12; wrote treatise on conic sections at sixteen; invented a calculating machine at eighteen. In his early 30’s, he experienced a mystical conversion and spent the rest of his life writing philosophical treatises. Among other things, Pascal was concerned with the existence of grace and what lay outside the limits of human knowledge. In the place of proof, Pascal offered the necessity of faith in something—a "truth"—that could be neither proven nor dismissed. As he saw it, the need to prove something was a way to avoid the realm of doubt and revelation.

Paralleling Pascal, but in no way illustrating him or his work, Rockburne’s paintings develop and maintain a fruitful tension between doubt and proof, criticality and revelation. In Mozart and Mozart Upsidedown and Backward— the title refers to Mozart's deft compositional inversions—Rockburne aligns three tilted squares and a triangle in two similar configurations. On the left side, starting with the bottom square, the rich optical colors are violet, green red, and yellow, while the order is reversed on the right side. Where they overlap in the right configurations, the color of the red triangle rises in to the green square above it, and emerges intact at one corner. On the right side, the red triangle overlaps the green, lifting its plane into itself. The viewer sees two planes, the red triangle and a submerged shape. What is behind seems to float either in front or inside of what is above it.

In Rockburne’s work, the space does not recede literally or illusionistically. It is as if the radiant overlapping planes are also elastic films of light that beckon the viewer but doesn’t allow him or her to pass through them, and experience what lies on the other side. Despite their insistent frontality, the viewer reads depth and intuits the existence of an immense, light filled space behind them. At the same time, the layered, transparent planes are simultaneously figure and ground, solid and atmosphere, tinted fields and faceted planes.

Rockburne’s accomplishment is the result of her ability to reconcile what we, in our binary approach to the world, think of as opposites. She does not deny their identity as opposites. That kind of thinking and perceiving is too generalized and mushy. In her work, which is always completely specific in its dichotomies, a geometric form becomes a luxuriant optical plane and vice versa. Identities, the rigid categories they are thought to inhabit, are effectively transformed into constantly metamorphosizing presences.

Shortly after her 1988 exhibition, Pascal and Other Concerns, Rockburne began extending her premises in a series of ten works which she calls Cut-Ins. The artist is not only making an explicit reference to Matisse and Pontormo, but is suggesting how she has used their work as a foundation for her own. Whereas Matisse cut his organic forms out of paper, Rockburne’s prepared acetate planes cut into space. His forms tend to be enclosed and curvilinear, while hers tend to be expansive and geometric. In his work, color and plane become unified, while in hers, vivid light and planar form become interchangeable. Light radiates out from unseen dimensions, and color pushes against color. Lustrous planes become chromatic forms and vice versa.

In his cut out, Memory of Oceania, 1953, which is in the Museum of Modern Art, Matisse tilted an elongated rectangle across the largely static composition. A white ground holds the geometric and organic forms in place. His domain is one of harmony, balance, and memory. We, in our contemporary arrogance, think of it as a world far removed from us. However, by connecting Matisse and Pontormo, among others, to her ongoing project, Rockburne demonstrates the falsity of this kind of thinking. At the same time, her work does not long for the past; it is without nostalgia.

In The Cross is in the Center, Tintoretto, 1989, Rockburne affixed four acetate triangles a uniform distance apart from each other within a tilting square. Each acetate triangle has been painted with a corresponding section of a concentric, lime green square. Together, they define one square within another.

At the same time, because it is painted black, the space between the triangles can be read as a thin black cruciform cutting through the center of the initial tilting square. While the black of the cruciform makes it appear as if it is on top or in front of the tilting, lime green square, the opposite is in fact true. Finally, the concentric lime green rectangle seems to be receding towards a vanishing point at the center of both the tilting square and the cruciform. Color and plane contradict each other. What is behind appears to be in front, while what is in front seems to be behind.

Enclosing all of these contradictions is a scarlet lake rectangle, which frames the tilting square within a square, and the two squares extending out of it, one from the top right side and the other from the bottom left. Both of these squares are defined by a red and a violet triangle. They, in turn, have been defined by either a convex or concave film of brushstrokes. There is a vivid tension along every seam and overlap. Rich optical colors and their complementaries pulsate, like a heartbeat. A disrupted but unbroken chain of interrelationships has been fitted together with all the precision and accuracy of a stone mason.

In Ideal City, 1989, Rockburne articulates a provocative proposal regarding the "ideal city." Developed out of her reading of Piero’s view of Jerusalem in The Discovery and Proof of the Cross, the Golden Section, proportional relationships, Modernist predecessors, and her watercolor Gerusalemme, Gerusalemme, 1987 Ideal City is a single, irregularly shaped geometric shape consisting of lustrous triangles and a square within an ultramarine blue rectangle. Disparate geometries and complementary hues have been made into one overall, interlocking shape, whose sections the viewer can endlessly reconfigure. Together, the part to part, and part to whole relationships constitute a constantly shifting realm. An ideal city, Rockburne's work shows us, is one which develops out of proportional interrelationships. Its planner recognizes difference rather than stresses similarity or imposes an abstract order.

The discovery of an inner order is also articulated in the austere complemantaries of The Plan of St. Gall. In the lower right hand side, a golden circle, an incomplete white square made up of folded planes, and a blue triangle have been made to interlock. Planes and folds overlap, reveal hidden sides, and cover other planes. A sense of imminent change is contained with the asymmetrical ordering of light and dark. In "Chaos and darkness are annihilated by light. Alfred Brendel",1989, the light and dark have become abutting planes of lustrous, complementary color. At the same time, the brilliant, reflective light of the gold leaf fuses the chromatic dissonances and abutted planes into an overall geometric form.

Like Matisse, Rockburne believes that colors can act upon the viewer's deepest feelings. In a statement he prepared for his Chapelle de Rosaire, Matisse wrote: " A blue, for instance, accompanied by the shimmer of its complementaries, acts upon the feelings like a sharp blow on a gong." Rockburne’s synthetic vision is far more dissonant in its chromatic tones and geometric disruptions. As the aptly titled cut-in, Acid Incongruities, 1989 suggests, her colors and forms are capable of ringing a subtler range of contradictory feelings.

Always expansive and purposeful in her approach, Rockburne has transformed Matisse’s harmonious orders into chromatic dissonances all her own. And out of these dissonances, she has been able to distill the rapture and glory of doubt and exaltation. She has reached this elusive, emotional realm by reading herself into history, and economically assimilating Matisse's "harmonies" and Mondrian’s "dynamic equilibrium" during the process. An original thinker, she has made use of Pontormo’s expressive individuality and Pascal’s philosophical arguments, as well as her own inner faith.