DAISY AMES

I finally convinced some friends to take a road trip to Dia: Beacon this weekend, after years of wanting to revisit. The moment I entered the Agnes Martin room, I got weak in the knees. There is such peace and softness in the collection of paintings that I couldn’t help but try to understand the mental state in which she painted. I focussed on the 72” x 72” canvases which had two or three horizontal bands of varying pastel hues. The colors seemed to be a watered down (not watercolor) but more like a gessoed-down version of itself. Then, on top of the uneven seam between the two tones, a very sharp and precise pencil line was drawn over the division. This gave the illusion from afar that they were painted with a much denser layer of paint which accentuated the distinction between the colors. In addition, these lines did not terminate at the end of the canvas, but stopped within the frame, offset roughly two or three inches. I could image these lines requiring more than just the arm or wrist, but the whole body to move the length of the canvas allowing a steady drag of a pencil to be slowly and carefully lifted right before the edge. The perfection that some of the artist like Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Blinky Palermo, Bruce Neuman, Robert Ryman, along with Martin, achieve is incredibly impressive. Knowing that the precision is part of the charm, it allows a viewer to wonder how it was executed, and the art becomes a product which reflects the process of art-making. Some of the artists’ theories try to deny the existence of object or subject, so the focus suddenly becomes you, the viewer, and what it means to you. The open interpretation makes something that seems so simple become very complex and different in everyone’s eyes. The ambiguity of subject and viewer, the line between product and producing an object, is still a very captivating concept.

Detail of edge of painting.