Radiant Energy
Gabriele Evertz, Robert Swain, Sanford Wurmfeld
by Matthew Deleget
The following text was published in the exhibition catalogue Radiant Energy on the occasion of the three-person exhibition of works by Gabriele Evertz, Robert Swain, and Sanford Wurmfeld curated by Mary Birmingham at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit, NJ, 2018.
How many distinct colors do you think the human eye can see? One hundred? A thousand? Or even ten thousand colors? Researchers today estimate that we can distinguish between seven to ten million different hues. Select women can detect even more than that. Human visual acuity is astonishing. Color is, of course, light and not a physical substance at all. It begins first as a sensation we see and then transforms into a phenomenon of our perception, which is consciously and unconsciously informed by our experiences. Light enters the eye and hits the retina, which is made up of millions of tiny photoreceptors, which are called rods and cones because of their shapes. The cones are sensitive to the wavelengths of red, blue, and green, and they send electrical signals via the optic nerve to the brain, helping us to identify and ultimately make sense of the things we are seeing. To say color is critical in enabling us to navigate our world would be an understatement. It is essential. For most people, everything is experienced in full vivid color.
Now, how many of those millions of colors can we identify specifically by name? That number is substantially less, perhaps several dozen We do have distinct names for the primary colors (red, yellow, and blue), the secondaries (orange, green, and violet), and neutrals (black, white, and gray). But aside from brown and, of course, pink – which is an odd exception since we don’t have comparable words for light blue and light yellow – our ability to simply name colors is severely limited. And most significantly, how do colors make us feel? It’s clear that color can elicit an entire spectrum of responses in us. Color can be pure emotion and can be infused with limitless external associations that reflect our psyche, our personal experiences, and our cultural context and heritage. Why, for instance, in American culture, is red associated with anger, blue with sadness, and black with mourning? In other cultures, of course, these same colors may have completely different associations.
For the three acclaimed artists presented in Radiant Energy – Gabriele Evertz, Robert Swain, and Sanford Wurmfeld – color is the content of their paintings and the purpose of their life’s work. Color is both a subject of bottomless inquiry and a pragmatic problem to be solved. Taken together these three artists represent the current vanguard of color painting on the international stage. Born within five years of each other in three disparate locations – Robert Swain in Austin, Texas, in 1940; Sanford Wurmfeld in the Bronx, New York, in 1942; and Gabriele Evertz in Berlin, Germany, in 1945 – all three artists arrived independently at color’s doorstep decades ago.
Evertz, Swain, and Wurmfeld first crossed paths many years ago in the renowned art department at Hunter College in New York City, where all three taught. Evertz also studied and continues to teach there. During the 1950s and 1960s, first under the guidance of artist Robert Motherwell and then curator and critic E.C. Goossen, Hunter’s art department pivoted from a vocational school to a true fine arts program that completely embraced the art of its time. By the 1970s and 1980s, Hunter had developed into the leading champion of abstraction and, more specifically, color painting, among art schools in the United States. A new Hunter Color School had emerged, and I firmly believe that in the not-so-distant future it will prove to be as innovative and influential as the now celebrated Bauhaus and Black Mountain College schools. The Hunter Color School is more than overdue for a survey exhibition of its own.
Along with their many fellow artists and educators, such as kindred spirits Doug Ohlson, Vincent Longo, Ray Parker, Ralph Humphrey, Mac Wells, and Valerie Jaudon, among others, Evertz, Swain, and Wurmfeld foregrounded an urgent concern for color painting and its transformative effect on the viewer. It should be noted that all three artists possess an exhaustive understanding of color and its extensive history, both as historians and as practitioners. Taken together, they share more than a century of color research and accrued wisdom, and their individual discoveries radiate in this exhibition.
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, both artists and non-artists alike have examined and attempted to systematize color and its attributes, looking at it through the lenses of philosophy, literature, physics, chemistry, biology, physiology, psychology, linguistics, and many other disciplines. When we talk about color today, it is clear we’re speaking about something that is inherently interdisciplinary. The subject of color belongs to the study of the human experience. And our ability to learn new things about color and how it functions is limitless.
Similarly, our quest to analyze and, in turn, systematize color – conducted over the centuries by pioneers such as physicist Sir Isaac Newton, writer and poet Wolfgang von Goethe, chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, or painter and educator Josef Albers – is something that can never truly be completed. Color investigation usually begins as an objective pursuit, but it quickly proves to be less than an exact science, eventually moving into the subjective and reflecting the disposition of the researcher. To date, no one theory or approach has universally won out over all others to become the definitive model for understanding color and its effects. Questions about color have been asked for generations, and I can safely say they will persist far into the foreseeable future.
Evertz, Swain, and Wurmfeld have each committed the best of themselves to color. They’ve developed their own unique precepts and models for thinking about it, and have been conceiving and creating paintings to express those ideas for upwards of fifty years. Their recent paintings included in this exhibition are comprehensively considered and represent decades of inquiry and accumulated wisdom. Working at the intersection of experience and intuition, they have each made new discoveries by looking and working with color directly.
At its core, color is a three-dimensional problem. Each painting in this exhibition began as an investigation into color’s three distinct attributes: hue (a single, pure color), value (the lightness or darkness of a color), and saturation (the relative purity or intensity of a color). Every color imaginable can be mapped according to these three criteria. It is also well known by now that our perception of a specific color flexes depending on its quantity, its shape, and its proximity to other colors in a painting. Our perception is also affected by the particular physical attributes of the painting itself (its size and shape), our distance from the artwork, and the amount of time we spend looking at it. And finally, color is impacted by the lighting we use to see it, whether natural or artificial. .
Why is it important then to examine color painting right now? My short answer is that it has never been more innovative. Evertz, Swain, and Wurmfeld are each working at the very top of their abilities, making the most informed and compelling paintings of their lifetimes. My longer answer though is that our times have never been more urgent. We are currently living in the throws of a new digital age in which an endless stream of visual and verbal information assaults our senses on a daily basis and puts us into a persistent state of distraction, if not agitation. Every conceivable kind of information is flashed 24/7 across a petite, glowing screen that fits all too comfortably into the palm of our hand. Social media, streaming media, push notifications, apps, instant messaging, email, and more have left us with increasingly shorter attention spans. We are both less informed and ultimately less wise as a result.
These three artists provide us with an antidote to the malaise of our digital century. Their paintings function not as rejections of our wireless age but as returns to our core capacities as human beings. Although taking a selfie in front of these works might be too tough to resist – I’ve witnessed that phenomenon countless times – the artists invite us to put our devices away for a moment, to slow down, and to simply look at their paintings first hand and in real time. These works are produced neither through digital, analog, nor even mechanical means; rather they are made by eye and by hand, slowly and deliberately over time. And counter to our passive experience with digital media, the artists ask us to be alert, to look actively, and to focus our attention on the information in front of us. These paintings demand to be seen first hand through direct contact.
The importance of our role as observers in truly activating these works cannot be stressed strongly enough. It makes sense to remind ourselves that the first viewers of these works are the artists themselves. They’ve spent decades finely calibrating our viewing experience. The paintings are keyed to our capacity for seeing and the physiology of our being. Evertz, Swain, and Wurmfeld are well aware that the ability to see color is not determined by age, gender, geographic location, or cultural context. And our role in their work is catalytic. We literally bring the paintings to life.
So what should we particularly pay attention to? To begin, throughout most of painting’s history, the opportunities to experience color without the interference of an image have been rare. Color traditionally has been used to describe an object, individual, or environment. Even the superlative color painters of European art history, such as Johannes Vermeer, J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet, Georges Seurat, and Pierre Bonnard, were beholden to depicting images. However, with the emergence of abstraction about a century ago, color came to be considered a subject in itself. Abstraction, and color painting specifically, played a leading role in American modern art throughout the 20th century, from the works of Morgan Russell, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, and Stuart Davis, at its beginning, to those of Josef Albers, Hans Hofmann, Ad Reinhardt, and Helen Frankenthaler,, by its middle, to Alma Thomas, Bridget Riley, and Marcia Hafif, by its end.
Evertz, Swain, and Wurmfeld realized long ago that pure color experiences, despite lacking a traditional image, still require a shape or structure to inhabit, and after much trial and error, each has arrived at a distinctive compositional arrangement. Yes, the paintings of all three consist of matte acrylic paint applied to a flat surface smoothly and evenly in layers with a brush, forming clearly defined geometric shapes or patterns with straight edges. But within those parameters, the differences are extensive. Evertz uses vertical stripes and tapered lines. For Swain, the structure is a grid of repeating squares. And Wurmfeld creates overlayed grids of varying units set against contrasting borders.
Their color choices are also wildly divergent. Although the paintings on view in this exhibition may appear to be more similar than not upon first impression, they present a broad array of color principles and decisions. I encourage you to spend time with these works and to examine them closely, to ask questions of them, and to unpack them. Ask which color or set of colors are present in a given painting and which colors are not. How much of a color is there? Is each color represented in equal amounts? What is a color’s proximity to other colors, and what are those colors? How do adjacent colors impact each other? How are the colors arranged on the surface of the canvas? Are they symmetrical or asymmetrical? Do the colors change or modulate across the painting’s surface? Do the colors seem to move in a specific direction, such as diagonally or, from left to right, or top to bottom? Do any colors recede into deep space or appear to leap off the surface of the paintings? Is the overall palette harmonious or jarring, luminous or subdued? Are the colors active or passive? What shapes do the colors assume? How do the individual shapes in a painting relate to each other? And how does the size of the painting relate to your field of vision, to your body?
Clearly the paintings in this exhibition first engage our eyes, but they quickly engulf our minds. These works are not simply optical exercises. They conjure up in each of us an endless array of personal associations and emotional content. It’s definitely not wrong to ask how the colors presented in these paintings make you feel. What emotions, experiences, or memories come to mind? The range is immeasurable. I stand truly in awe of these artworks for the profound depth and dedication of the research that each artist invested in them, the deliberateness and precision with which they’re executed, and the awesome range of associations and emotions they evoke. These works are sublime, very much like the chemical process in which a physical material is transformed directly from a solid to a gas. Like ice evaporating into steam, these three artists present works that transform the raw stuff of pigment and canvas into experiences that are ethereal and ineffable. Color truly is a mysterious thing.