joseph scissorhands: Kenneth Noland: Stripes/Plaids/Shapes

Sunday 26 February 2023

Kenneth Noland: Stripes/Plaids/Shapes

Kenneth Noland - Galore, 1966

"I think of painting without subject matter as music without words."

- Kenneth Noland.

Installation View

To Pace to see the first solo exhibition in London by American abstract colour field painter Kenneth Noland in more than twenty years. Noland trained for two years at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he developed an interest in the potential of colour in his work under the influence of luminaries such as Anni and Josef Albers, John Cage and Ilya Bolotowsky, a proponent of De Stijl art theory, which would become an influence on Noland's later works. Noland went on to develop a distinct, colourful, personal visual language that includes symbols such as Circles, Chevrons and the Stripes, Plaids and Shaped canvases displayed in this exhibition. The striped paintings appeared like landscapes with vast horizons. Galore, (above) was an instant favourite. The diamond shaped canvas support and the slanted beautifully coloured stripes were reminiscent of mouth-watering sticks of rock that you find at seaside resorts. I thought the stripe paintings were most interesting where Noland overlapped the horizontal stripes with verticals to create a new dimension or 'plaid' paintings. There was a lovely tension created where the lines intersected, which unsurprisingly called to mind the works of Piet Mondrian. The surfaces of these paintings are interesting to observe as you can see the textures of the humble paint roller against the plainer surface of the masked out stripes. Another interesting development was in paintings such as Untitled 1976, where he has added a reflective gloss stripe against the matt background to vary the surface texture and tension, or in Field of Green where Noland allows the duller, dominant background colour to bleed into the vibrant stripes. I was really impressed by both Noland's colour palette and the shaped canvases which played strong optical tricks on the senses, giving a sense of distortion and disruption to the surface of the painted works and disorientation in the viewer too. Glean, and Field of Green, are great examples of this and were quite hard to photograph in this respect. One of my favourites in this series in the exhibition is Elongate, which is shaped like a shard of rose quartz crystal edged by a slice of grass green and navy blue on either side. This is another very strong museum quality show by Pace like that of Creating Abstraction last year, and I look forward to seeing what other exhibitions are on their schedule for the remainder of the year.