KAREN WILKIN
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spired by his much-quoted desire "to have color hover in the air, »
made boundaries and finiteness crucial . Robust edge drawing de–
fined the limits of these paintings, insistently restating the exact size
and proportion of the haze of color miraculously held before us and
making us aware that no matter how diaphanous these paintings ap–
peared to be, they were discrete objects made by a particular in–
dividual. Olitski's new pictures are so ephemeral, so elusive , so ra–
diant that they test the limits of perception. As an architect friend
said at first viewing, "You can't believe you're actually seeing them.»
And at the same time, they are sturdily, unignorably present.
During much of the last decade,Olitski avoided the lush color
of his early work, emphasizing instead tone and texture. Worked
surfaces of creamy monochromes or a range of extraordinary greys
often replaced the saturated hues once integral to his painting. But
not long ago, Olitski began experimenting with the reflective sur–
faces of colored and mirrored plastic, a potentially garish material
that seems to have released in him new ways of thinking about
painted color. His recent pictures are more subtly colored than was
habitual a few years ago. They take full advantage of what state of
the art acrylic paint can do, with its perlescence and interference col–
ors that change according to the angle from which light strikes them.
It takes time for the eye to adjust to Olitski's color, unstable and
seductive as the rainbow hues of mother of pearl; pictures that first
appear monochromatic become complex orchestrations of silvery
pastels after concentrated viewing.
The new pictures are also more substantial than ever before.
Olitski's nacreous color seems to emanate from his thick paint , ap–
plied to the canvas in broad swipes like giant paw marks . Since the
slabs of color appear to have been applied incrementally, the paint–
iRg becomes a rhythmically measured expanse of luminous units ,
each intimately related to what surrounds it, but each with its own
character. In some pictures, each slab has its own color, within a
narrow range, while in others, a single hue dominates , making the
inflected drawing within the slabs even more eloquent.
Olitski's new paintings are totally twentieth century objects as
dependent on modern day plastics technology for their tactile , opti–
cal, and, in some ways, their evocative properties as Venetian paint–
ing of the Renaissance was on the technology of oil paint in the six–
teenth century . Yet despite their material currency, Olitski's recent
work has stronger associations with Old Master painting than with
the work of most of his contemporaries. His flickering lights and
