Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue
Mary Corse at Pace Gallery
One of the very many wonderful things about Mary Corse is that it is almost impossible to digitally reproduce her work. Sure, the paintings show up on film (they’re not vampires), but in photographs they appear merely as objects, humdrum and inert on a blank wall. This anti-digital trick lies in the nature of her paint: Corse mixes it with the same reflective flecks that scatter light and cause road signs to glow when headlights pass over them. For this reason it is only in being in front of them that you can believe their magic.
This does not mean, however, that they never appear inert in person, but when they do, it is strategic, and has more to do with the contrast between states of refraction and mutedness than with a shortcoming of photographic technology. In one of the ten recent paintings on view at Pace’s brand new gallery megaplex on 25th Street, she paints white, vertical stripes in patterns of three. Two are painted with the reflective highway paint, while the third is matte. These matte strips disappear into the wall behind the painting, placing precedence not on what is contained within the canvas, but on what parts of it are able to transcend their materiality and interact with light. This piece, which is located directly to the left as you enter, acts as a gloss on the show, a roadmap revealing how you are to approach the other works. It declares that these paintings are not about the paint, but about perception.
Mary Corse Untitled (White, Black,Red, Beveled), 2019glass microspheres inacrylic on canvas78" × 19' 6" × 4" (198.1 cm× 594.4 cm × 10.2 cm). © Mary Corse, courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Lighting these works, of course, is of monumental importance. Do it wrong and you are guaranteed a show that falls short of what these paintings are capable of expressing. Pace, however, is guilty of no such critique, paying equal attention to the works and their environs. The installation of space is deliberately awkward, with a central room flanked by long hallways with no possibility of egress. They intentionally stymie gallery flow, and dead-end in monochrome white paintings, making the approach feel like a nave culminating in an altar, a not-inappropriate metaphor, as churches share a Corse-like obsession with the way (heavenly) light is perceived and directed.
Many of these techniques, however, have been present in Corse’s oeuvre for decades. What is new in this body of recent paintings is her bold and unflinching use of primary color, which makes an appearance at the main event— a room carved out of the center of the gallery, in which five canvases hang, three in color. These works in red, yellow, and blue are spectacular (again, don’t rely on the images to convince you—see for yourself), the more so for being unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.
Each painting is comprised of five bands: the edges are the same refractive white—a Corse signature— the second layers matte black, and the center a square of color painted with the same microbead-enhanced paint.
Mary Corse, Untitled (White, Black,Blue, Beveled), 2019 glass microspheres inacrylic on canvas 78" × 19' 6" × 4" (198.1 cm× 594.4 cm × 10.2 cm). © Mary Corse, courtesy of Pace Gallery.
The key here is the black, which delineates the edges of the color tangent to it. Black is a chasm into which light falls, the opposite of the panels of microbeads whose slick surfaces almost seem to reject light. Again, there is contrast, but this time the sponge of black seems to absorb the room’s light so that the color next to it can explode with energy. (This reminds me of Lee Bontecou, who would line the chasms in her sculptures with black velvet so they appeared to be an abyss.)
Overwhelmed by the sensation of color—something which I felt rather than saw— a thought occurred to me. Mary Corse has done Barnett Newman better than Newman himself, removing the work from representation by insisting the action here is not taking place on the canvas, where is it bound by objecthood, but in some space beyond it. It might even be that the action is taking place in your eye. This is the most abstract abstraction, the most impressionistic impressionism.
Abstraction seems to be taking somewhat of a backseat in painting these days, deferring to a new era of identity-based portraiture, but Corse proves there is still more to be mined, that the attraction in the challenge of releasing painting from representation has not waned. There is more to see here—just make sure to see it in person.
Pace Gallery
Until December 21