Mary Corse at Ace - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, June, 1996 by Lilly Wei

To exhibit, at Ace Gallery must be both exhilarating and exceptionally daunting, even for the most ambitious and self-confident artist. Its unforgiving spaces inevitably become a player in their own right; in these art-vs.-architecture face-offs, it's the survival of the fittest. Some shows have looked amazing, work and space in total sync; others have seemed diminished by the gallery's cavernous recesses. Mary Corse's exhibition this past winter surveying 30 years of her art from 1964 to 1994 unfortunately fell into the latter category, her monochromes drained by the milieu, unsustained by Ace's cool, monochromatic architecture.

Corse has great inventive abilities and a range that should have carried the day; she has rigorous craftsmanship and she most certainly has ambition. While the scope of her aspirations and the dimensions of her project have always been impressive and her focus clear, her vision in this instance was not well-served by her most recent production. Particularly in the latest paintings - White Light Painting with Squares (1994) and Black Light Painting (Shadow Painting) with Four Arches (1994) - she seems to have succumbed to the temptation of sheer scale. These are two of the largest works she has ever made, at a looming 8 by 34 feet and 9 by 28 feet respectively. They are imposing, but at a cost; delicacy and differentiation of surface have been lost. In Ace's enormous, echoing galleries, the pieces had the chilly, programmatic air of art associated with corporate megalobbies.

Corse, a Californian, was an early admirer of Robert Irwin, and like him, has spent her life analyzing light and its effects. Her mostly monochromatic paintings of deep blacks, pure and off-whites and grays that shade from a sparkling, near black to a subtle, pearlescent shimmer each give off their own luminescence, creating an illusion of ambient space or depth of field on a two-dimensional surface. In pursuit of light - phenomenological but, in the end, not without sublimity - she has constructed spare, sophisticated light boxes and fired lustrous ceramic tiles; she has also mixed small squares of metallic glitter and glass microspheres into her paint to up the wattage. The earliest pieces in the show were white geometrically shaped canvases from the mid-'60s, followed by the light boxes of a few years later.

As you entered the gallery, at one end of its long central corridor a brilliant white screen flickered and hummed in a darkened niche like an electronic oracle. Square, modest in size, it hovered over a white base and, from a distance, seemed to be suspended in mid-air; but it was actually held in place by thin, clear wire. At the other end of the corridor were two slender 8-foot triangular columns aligned so their baselines were parallel but not quite touching, their apices pointed outward. These were also white, with fastidiously worked, softly radiant surfaces. Surface, scale, light, color and shapes were absolutely consonant in both these works, which combined an auratic presence with an utterly pragmatic and variable materiality that made them the single, most satisfying installation of the show. Many of the earlier works from the '60s and '70s were also compelling as their surfaces resonated between the solidity of matter and the insubstantiality of light.

In other galleries, the ongoing "White Lights" series, also begun in the late '60s, were shown, followed by the eye-catching, gridded "Black Glitter Paintings" of the '70s, their basic unit a spangled black squar - like glitzy, glamorized, scaled-up Ad Reinhardts. The "Black Earth" paintings - glazed ceramic tiles with uneven, wavering surfaces cast from the rocks near Corse's home - gave way to the first Black Light Painting of 1983; these were not made with metallic sequins but with glass microspheres, like the "White Light Paintings." In the late '80s, the "Gray Light Paintings," Gray Grids" and "Black Arches" (really post-and-lintel sequences) appeared; the latter provide another framing device, like the beveled edges she frequently uses, enclosures to contain and concentrate energy within the painting.