Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Starting in the 1950s and for nearly a lifetime, he essentially painted this samealmost all-white painting.
Metaphysically speaking, his art represents a concrete Platonic nonobjective milestone.
Ryman is the deliverer, explorer, explainer, poet of this jot down.
It can take decades to understand why Rymans paintings are art at all.
Its worth it though and helps open you to art in ways you mightnt expect.
Rymans work has always been the subject of cartoons of vexed viewers scowling at this latest art sham.
Ryman reduced painting to its most basic processes, components, conditions, and qualities in undisguised clear ways.
Wallace Stevens wrote that Poetry is the subject of poetry.
Ryman said he made paintings of paint and used white so that everything will be visible.
He called his work absolute and realist because he was uninterested in creating an illusion.
Rymans work is far from as simple as it sounds.
Just his materials and support surface form a lexicon of painterly vocabulary.
His finish was as varied.
He worked mat, glossy, rough, smooth, feathery, gruff.
His paintings also attach to walls in all manner of hanging mechanisms and handmade devices.
Some on traditional hooks or wires strung across the back of the painting.
More often bolts, screws, clips, clasps, brackets, braces, grommets, and struts.
Some hang flat to the wall; others cantilever out as horizontal tabletoplike things.
Why should we look at white paintings?
In 1963, Robert Rauschenberg said he thought of white paintings as being not passive but very … hypersensitive.
Order and chaos merge.
Rymans work is never Expressionistic, neither is it an Abstract Expressionist notion of the ineffable sublime.
Theres a quiet concentration and absorption to everything he does that leaves a lot of room for viewers contemplation.
Rymans paintings are similar to describing the way people dress.
There are scores of things going on in every garment, outfit, and combination.
For him the modernist monochromatic trope is a gateway or foyer to unexpected visual-conceptual experiences.
His paintings become engines of an odd sensuousness and painterly syntaxes.
