Richard Smith at Tony Shafrazi - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, June, 1995 by David Ebony

The big surprise of Richard Smith's recent exhibition was his return to "easel painting." Early on in his career, the British-born abstractionist used a standard, oil-on-rectangular-canvas format [see A.i.A., Oct. '92]. However, over the past 30 years or so, he has concentrated on shaped canvases and three-dimensional constructions. Perhaps best known of these, the so-called "kite" series, which sometimes resemble Japanese box kites, blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Because of their light weight, they lend themselves easily to monumental scale, and Smith has spent a good part of recent years working on enormous pieces for public spaces such as airports, industrial parks and shopping centers around the world. Some of the new paintings look like two-dimensional renditions of the "kite" works. A 5 1/2-by-6-foot painting titled Palace, for instance, has diagonal black lines disposed at regular intervals across a field of white-and-light-gray crosshatch. The rhythmic lines and cool spaces of the painting suggest airborne kites that sway and dart about in the breeze.

A number of works seem to refer to architectural forms. In the painting titled Nest two bluish-gray rectangular slabs look like tombstones or like skyscrapers looming over a vast blue-gray landscape. Optophone, a work whose title suggests a sensation of both sight and sound, shows four long, narrow rectangular white boxes, one in each corner of the picture. Receding into a background of horizontal gray stripes, the boxes seem to hover in midair, about to converge near the center of the canvas.

In spite of his use of illusionistic space in the new work, Smith appears concerned primarily with surface. After years of manipulating sculptural forms, the artist seems to be making up for lost time, reimmersing himself in an exploration of pure painting--the sensuous properties and expressive possibilities of paint and line. In terms of color, the new work is more reductive than his earlier work, but layers of mostly white, gray and black are built upon brilliant-colored grounds that show through in certain passages and activate the surfaces like vibrant highlights. The subtlety of the technique recalls works by purists such as Ryman and Martin, but Smith's visual punch has more in common with early Stella and late Tworkov.

Perhaps the most striking of Smith's new works on view were grid paintings titled Net, Illumination and Farewells, each about 5 by 6 feet. Net has an allover gray grid that covers a background of white-and-yellow crosshatch which echoes the weft and weave of fabric. Illumination, with a pink grid, looks like a computer-generated image of four white rectangles. A ghostly white haze to the left of each rectangle suggests motion, as if the shapes move in the shallow space from background to foreground. In Farewells, four black rectangles seem to leave smoky trails as they pass through the dense gray background to interface with an eye-popping, Day-Glo yellow grid spanning the surface. Exemplifying Smith's graceful return to work in two dimensions, these paintings are at once retrospective and prescient. David Ebony