Paul Klee

“Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible,”

Piet Modrian

This is the painting that knocks the wind out of me at the MOMA. Brings tears. Seems the most sacred.

‘Everything was spotless white, like a laboratory. In a light smock, with his clean-shaven face, taciturn, wearing his heavy glasses, Mondrian seemed more a scientist or priest than an artist. The only relief to all the white were large matboards, rectangles in yellow, red and blue, hung in asymmetric arrangements on all the walls. Peering at me through his glasses, he noticed my glance and said: “I’ve arranged these to make it more cheerful.”‘

He painted a fake tulip white because he banned the colour green from being in his house

* * Play the Modrian Machine * *

Ellsworth Kelly

“I noticed that the large windows between the paintings [in the Musee d'Art Moderne] interested me more than the art exhibited. From then on, painting as I had known it was finished for me.”
(Ellsworth Kelly)

Caio Fonseca

Harder than finding the painting I am going to do, “Caio Fonseca said in a recent interview, “is deciding what painting I am not going to do.”

It’s a puzzling statement from a painter whose work seems, at least at first acquaintance, to be triggered wholly by informed intuition and made without prior decisions.

The ambiguous, colored shapes that float across the surfaces of Fonseca’s canvases and works on paper resist identification, as if pulled directly from the unconscious.

They also refuse to settle down spatially; unnamable, but richly associative, they pulse between figure and ground, now appearing nearly submerged by creamy expanses of paint, now breaking free to hover in fictive space.

These apparently unpremeditated, albeit rigorously ordered, paintings always read as the product of accretion, which makes Fonseca’s comment about refusal and denial somewhat surprising. Yet longer acquaintance with his work of the past few years makes it clear that his emphasis on rejecting possibilies is very real.

Since about 2000, Fonseca’s process could, in fact, be characterized not simply as “finding the painting” but as creating as open-ended set of visual possibilities and then gradually destroying all of the roads not taken.

Painting a Paradox by Karen Wilken, Art in America

http://www.caiofonseca.com