Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jules Olitski
American; 20th-century
New York, NY: Yares Art (Exhibition: Fields of Color V)
88%
First Love — 9. 1972. Acrylic on canvas
This is absolute peak Olitski, a tour de force of pure painting winnowed almost to nothing, but still so substantial, so varied. By the early seventies, he had settled on a method: paint a big swath or swaths of monochrome near-emptiness to take up almost the whole of the canvas, and then edge the rectangle ever so thinly (and not all the way around) with some sort of out-there combination of colors (here it's bright yellows, blues, and pinks), so that that whole gulping void in the center, despite its recalcitrant "thereness" on (or as) the actual surface of the painting, can't avoid being "read" pictorially, as a figure in lockstep with its ground, as an illusion in one way or another. This painting does all that, and does it better than just about any Olitski I've seen. The banding at the edges is so narrow as almost to vanish, yet when they need to its colors whine against the cloudy white they're bracketing, and it (the banding) wavers enough — it has just enough painterly verve inside it — to keep things from seeming at all "designy." Too, the whole left edge and some of the right aren't bound by any strips of color, but open, as if to infinity. These are compositional devices well-deployed, like Ruisdael's trees or a Caravaggio tabletop. And then there's that void, which makes up most of the canvas: sufficiently regular to seem like a single thing, sufficiently varied — the thickness of the paint shifts a bit across the surface; the shade of curdled-milk white grades from darker to lighter and back to darker, and it even, here and there, incorporates mists of orange — to seem alive. (TFS, 2025)
Chicago, IL: EXPO Chicago (Yares Art’s Booth)
77%
Judith Juice. 1965. Acrylic on canvas
This painting's thing is to use its orange inverted L and that vanishing seagreen repoussoir at right to make you think that the marquee blue rectangle is a vast undifferentiated expanse (but it isn’t). The colored edges articulate all that blue as a sort of totality, an indefectible unity — there are three things in this painting (orange, green, blue), each of them is whole, and the most important of the three is the blue rectangle, which is a monument to what blue rectangles are. But then you keep looking and you notice that not only are the edges irregular, which is apparent, but also that there are little gradations and tiny errant marks all throughout the blue, which makes it seem both more and less like a whole. At a high level, this is a fairly successful Olitski because it does a great job setting up this wishy-washy ontological play. At a more basic level (which undergirds the higher one, of course), it's successful because of the cluster of green in the lower third on the right that implies further greens up into the blank space above it; because of that spot where the same green band just barely slips its tail under the blue; because there are occasional gaps between the blue and the orange but none between the green and the blue; etc. However, Olitski tends to be a bit better than this when he achieves the same effects through even subtler means (read: thinner, less present segments of colored banding). (TFS, 2025)