Radiant dispersion: Robert Ryman's Philadelphia prototype, 2002 - multipanel paintings

Acknowledging Ryman's closeness to Newman in the Prototype paintings allows us to grasp characteristics that establish essential difference. Most obvious is scale and format: smaller panels, in Ryman's case, that are not vertical or horizontal but neutrally square. Further, Ryman's repetition of the vertical line, which occurs twice within each panel and is positioned in roughly the same places from one panel to the next, creates a serial doubling that eschews the episodic or developmental quality of Newman's Stations (as well as, of course, the existential thematics that were sometimes claimed by Newman for his work). Ryman's format is essentially repeated from one panel to the next, and, according to him, there is no prescribed order for reinstallation. Of course, the panels themselves are not identical; they were all produced through the application of a single procedure, but the result is a series of variations that express tolerances of difference embedded in a restrictive yet itself restricted seriality of means.

So, for example, the distribution of tape around the four edges of each panel does not follow a prescribed pattern from one to the next. Moreover, each of the exposed lines is accompanied by the ghostly presence of a second--sometimes a third--thinly painted shadow line running beside it. The shadow line is produced by slightly repositioning strips of tape between multiple applications of paint. In each panel, one line is always somewhat more complexly shadowed in this way than the other.

Creating and installing a Prototype actually constitute a single procedure. This includes the sequence according to which the panels are first attached to the wall and painted: In Philadelphia, Ryman began with two panels in the corner--one on each of the two adjacent walls--in order to establish a comfortable distance between them, which comes to roughly one-half of the panel's width. The measured intervals that will govern the entire painting (thirty-one centimeters in Philadelphia, as the artist spontaneously recalled in conversation with me) are derived from this initial act. Three panels were then added on the long wall, at which point the artist began to paint. Further panels were added in subsequent campaigns of work, expanding the piece. In determining the final number, a generous amount of empty wall space was left at both ends of the row--a "breathing space," as Ryman calls it.

In contrast to the Stations, the spaces that separate the panels in the Prototype paintings are integrated into the work: While Newman's stretched canvases possess body, which distinguishes them from the wall, Ryman's vinyl squares are as close as possible to being flush with the wall plane without actually losing their identity as autonomous objects. This is essential. Ryman activates this closeness by making the support and the wall share a layer of paint. The act of applying paint so that it exceeds the edges of each panel and runs onto the wall is an extrapolation of the role of the tacking margin in painting after the New York School, which initiated the abandonment of the picture frame; for Rothko and Newman, this would open pictorial space out onto the wall plane and into the actual space of the room. That move is literalized by Ryman's procedure, which further serves to transform the three surfaces--paint, panel, and wall--into multiple layers of a single entity. The flushness is emphasized by those u npainted areas around the edges that mark where pieces of tape originally held the panels to the wall. By applying paint both as a surface and as a fastening system, and by indexing these functions with the exposed areas of removed tape that run off the panel onto the wall, Ryman defines the reciprocity of paint/panel and panel/wall as being both formal and mechanical--a kind of physical binding. A Ryman Prototype holds itself up. Beginning with the tape-removal paintings, this improbable feat--which is, above all, a stroke of superb wit--has represented a historical development in the philosophy and practice of painting.