Moving Pictures:
Regarding the "optical art" of Julian Stanczak and Leo Villareal
By
REUBEN M. BARON and JOAN BOYKOFF BARON
Julian Stanczak
Amberoid 1976,
acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches
Courtesy Stefan Stux Gallery, NY
exhibitions
considered in this essay:
Julian Stanczak:
Master of Op Art: Highlights of the Past 40 Years
Stefan Stux Gallery
529 West 20th Street, 9th floor,
New York, NY 10011
212-352-1600
February 14
to March 20, 2004
Leo Villareal: Chasing Rainbows
Sandra Gering Gallery
534 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
646-336-7183
February 21
to March 20, 2004
In a rare treat,
New Yorkers could see two very different variants of optical art in
Chelsea galleries at the same time. When we use the term "optical"
we're not just referencing the Op Art movement of the 1960's but all
art that, although initially pre-categorical and at the level of visual
sensations, subsequently has the power to elicit cognitive and emotional
levels of responses. These "moving pictures" pulsate with
color, converting space into fields of energy. This broadened definition
of optical art allows us to juxtapose a painter, Julian Stanczak, with
a light sculptor, Leo Villareal. Villareal uses ensembles of LED tubes
run by computers to create ever-shifting horizontal bands of color that
at times are reminiscent of late works of Agnes Martin. Both exhibitions
are about color, light and time. Each artist, in his own way, creates
dazzling patterns of color, the old master, Stanczak (whose last solo
New York show was in 1979) in paint and the rising star, Villareal (with
his second solo New York show in two years) in cutting edge technology.
Both artists can
be criticized as creating transitory pleasures-art that is reducible
to visual tricks. But, is this fair? Isn't it about time we reassess
art based primarily on visual experiences-optical art writ broadly-in
regard to its place in the history of abstraction? First, it may be
argued that the best of such art, while starting out with the optical,
doesn't stay at that level of purely visual experiences. Thus, while
the thrust of PostModernism is to make seeing a handmaiden of believing,
for Stanczak and Villareal seeing is believing; the mind is informed
by the eye.
Leo Villareal Chasing
Rainbows: 2004 (detail)
LEDS, circuitry. 5' x 8' x 4'
Courtesy Sandra Gering Gallery, New York
The reality they
both offer us is constructed by the viewer out of visual evidence that
prompts and sometimes compels certain interpretations-we complete incomplete
forms, and in Stanczak's case, experience illusory colors. Most importantly,
these artists go beyond visual magic. They force us to amend Willoughby
Sharp's (1967) claim that kinetic art in general, and light art in particular,
strives for "effect not meaning." Meaning in the optical art
of Stanczak and Villareal begins with their ability to sensitize us
to the organizational processes that underlie the structure of the visual
world. Each artist exploits the dynamical principle that when complexity
reaches a certain level, we get "order for free", be it the
patterns that leap across space for Villareal or the bending of lines
and the appearance of X-like forms for Stanczak. Viewed this way, such
art belongs to a tradition in abstract art, personified by Jackson Pollock,
which is concerned with making "energy visible" (Elderfield,
2001).
installation shot
at Sandra Gering Gallery
Looking at the specific
works, first of Villareal and then of Stanczak, the most salient commonality
is that both artists incorporate time into their art. For example, to
get the full effects of Villareal's latest installation, Chasing Rainbows,
the viewer stands (or sits) in one place and looks at the three panels
of the installation arranged in a "U" on three walls of the
gallery (see image). About fifteen minutes are necessary for a representative
sample of Villareal's dynamic organizations to emerge. Sometimes the
same image appears on the three panels-as soft monochromatic fields
of alternating pink, lilac, yellow, or green reminiscent of the Flavin
installations at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. At other times,
the colors blend into one another like a Jeremy Blake video. Every so
often, each panel has a large embedded square recalling Albers or perhaps
Rothko as the color combinations of the squares and their neighbors
morph before us. Occasionally, the three panels have patterns of movement
reminiscent of Hans Hoffman, as several series of rectangles push and
pull themselves vertically or horizontally across the field. At times,
the three screens are sequential rather than simultaneous as colored
rectangles chase each other around the room from panel to panel or race
from floor to ceiling recalling the PacMan video game.
Julian Stanczak The Duel 1962-63
handground pigments on canvas, 54 x 79 inches
Courtesy
Stefan Stux Gallery, NY
Time is also a critical
condition for Stanczak's effects to emerge, although here time is less
a matter of waiting for things to happen and more a process of each
person's visual apparatus becoming attuned. Sometimes, Stanczak poses
a problem analogous to trying to seeing through a fog or mist. In other
more geometric works, the time involved is how long it takes and what
distance is required for a color that isn't objectively in the painting
to appear to be there and then disappear for the viewer. For example,
Amberoid, (1976-see image) appears to have a large yellow X which beckons
the viewer to approach, but when the viewer gets too close, the yellow
X suddenly disappears and what remains is only orange and green. In
other works, the bending of lines, the sensations of forms rising and
falling in a kind of rhythm are so immediately compelling that we need
to look away to keep our balance. In the earliest work in the show,
The Duel (1962-63-see image), the undulating forms appear to be coordinated,
ebbing and flowing in a kind of slow dance. Despite their abstract form,
Stanczak's less geometric works never appear totally free of nature.
In The Duel, for example, the lines appear hill-like or perhaps cloud-like.
In other works, the very energy of nature is harnessed in the painting.
Turbulent may be said to capture, in its abstract organization of swirling
lines, the forces of nature gathering strength as in a tornado. Stanczak
both abstracts nature and animates pure geometry to better reveal the
joys of color.
A distinction made
by Solomon Asch (1952) between a change in the "object of judgment
and a change in the judgment of the object" captures important
differences between the artists. Stanczak creates a situation where
there is change in the judgment of the object, whereas Villareal creates
a change in the object of judgment. For Stanczak, the painting does
not, in itself, control the perceiver's reactions. Rather, the complexity
of the stimulus, including incredibly subtle changes in the gradations
of color, becomes an occasion for the viewer's optical system to go
into overdrive. Stanczak's "work" is created in the interaction
between the viewer and the painting as an eliciting event. For Villareal,
the patterning is more "out there". In effect, perceptions
of movement of color in Villareal involve external complexity. The computer
program exploits a set of rules to create complex, self-organized patterns
where bands of color appear to leap from one set of light tubes to another
across time-space. This allows Villareal to shift the perceptual process
from object perception to environmental perception. If one is situated
along the fourth side of the gallery, ever-changing bands of color surround
the person, creating a place of enchantment from which it is hard to
leave.
In this new work,
Villareal creates Flavins for the computer age. If Flavin's fluorescent
tubes of light hover between the momentary and the timeless, Villareal's
LED tubes hover between the momentary and the future. In Villareal,
there is little rest for the weary eye; this is not a Matissian art
for the tired businessman. It demands a committed perceiver to allow
these patterns sufficient time to unfold into emergent patterns. The
most exciting illusion of all is that this ensemble appears to be organizing
itself into a superordinate entity. There is a perception that a particular
pattern is not localized in one ensemble but rather belongs to the super
set which is contained by the three walls of light tubes. Villareal
captures processes that cut across the organic and inorganic-machines
and biological life-leaving an awed spectator it its wake.
Stanczak creates
a different kind of abstract art. His abstractions are more related
to Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie than to a rootless specific object
of Judd or Flavin or Villareal. While Mondrian tried to capture the
rhythms of New York City, Stanczak's art is more concerned with the
rhythms of nature, of the play of light, shape, and shadows in the natural
world. Some of his most dazzling optical paintings can be seen as higher-order
transformations of concrete memories of childhood scenes such as seeing
an ensemble of zebras at a drinking hole in Africa. His memories of
endless horizons punctuated by shifting patterns of grass became transformed
into lines and forms that shimmer, and on occasion, rise up and bend
the picture plane. In such work, the operations of the visual apparatus
become a metaphor for the transformation of matter into energy, with
the ensuing explosion occurring in our "mind's eye."
If Villareal's recent
work is orchestral in its creation of environments of color, Stanczak's
work is like a string quartet playing complex disciplined music. Indeed,
on occasion, his paintings resemble sound waves. And then there is his
amazing use of color. In certain works it is as if Albers' (his teacher
at Yale) paintings were transformed-somehow speeded up, stretched and
pulled so we see Albers' squares of color bulging and leaking light.
Stanczak is giving us a new kind of cubism of light and color where
the linear dances with the nonlinear. His use of simultaneous contrast
is less didactic than in Albers, more filled with the flowing shapes
of a world that is ever in motion. For Stanczak, the homage is to the
life of the color rather than its container. Not too surprisingly, some
of Stanczak's most beautiful effects occur when one dims the lights;
the magical X's become luminescent-they shimmer as light does on water.
For both Villareal
and Stanczak, visual effects are means not ends. Villareal's subtext
is making us aware of self-organized systems. The emotions we experience
are those of wonder and awe as color breaks free from form. With Stanczak,
optical effects are also a means-they allow us to look more closely
at the processes behind nature's illusions of light, color and movement.
Stanczak and Villareal take us out of the mundane and connect us with
something of the sublime. They may well provide a Luminism for the 21st
century that transcends the duality between content and process, between
form and energy, and between the observed and the observer.
References
Asch, Solomon (1952).
Social Psychology. New York: Prentice Hall, p.424.
Elderfield, John
(2001). The Change of Aspect in Bridget Riley Reconnaissance. New York:
DIA, (September 21, 2000 through June 17, 2001), pp. 16.
Sharp, Willoughby
(1967). "Notes toward an Understanding of Light Art." Catalogue
essay for exhibition, "Light, Motion, Space" organized by
Walker Art Center in cooperation with Howard Wise Gallery, New York,
April 8 through May 21, 1967, p. 10.
REUBEN M. BARON, Professor Emeritus and Research Professor in the Department
of Psychology at the University of Connecticut is an independent curator
and social psychologist who has written extensively in a range of psychology
journals on differences between perceptual and conceptual modes of knowing.
His previous artcritical.com contribution was on Jo
Baer in Summer, 2003. JOAN BOYKOFF BARON is an independent curator
and an educational evaluation specialist who has directed a statewide
assessment of art and music for the Connecticut State Department of
Education and assisted other states and private foundations in developing
arts assessments. The Barons' joint art writings include two essays,
"Simply Complex: Monochrome Paintings from L.A." (September,
2000) and "Film Revival: Reinvigorating Abstraction in Painting
and Drawing" (September, 2003) that accompanied their co-curated
exhibitions at the Dorsky Gallery.
