EXCERPT FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT SLUTZKY

BY EMMANUEL J. PETIT
I was taught as an art student that it
was taboo to articulate the center of the
painting in too strong a way. The center
was a position in the canvas that didn't
want to be made too perceptually
obvious. As I began to become involved
with Mondrian's aesthetics of NeoPlasticism, I took that as a challenge. I
tried to treat the geographic center of the
painting as at once independent of its
surroundings and part of the
composition. Yet my painting is less
about an opposition between center and
periphery than an enactment of the
Source Hollandays, 1958/74
perceptual forces of push and pull. In an
early painting I did, called Source
Hollandays, the center of the canvas is occupied by a red square. But because this
shape immediately associates with its neighboring forms in different ways, the center
ceases to read as a center, and the eye engages in a multitude of relationships in
time. The black and white element brings the same idea into many other paintings of
mine. This idea has stayed with me a long time, through most of my paintings of the
1970s, '80s, and '90s, and eventually it has become a kind of signature. I suppose it is
an unconscious homage to one of my teachers, Josef Albers, to whom the center of
the canvas was very essential in his exploration of the square.
The central black and white element
denotes the ideal condition of
complementarity, one of the major
themes that runs through my work. More
metaphorically, it can be perceived as a
window of light and darkness. The white
is a field of light that seems to emanate
from behind the curtains of color to
expose the rear plane of the
composition. The black, on the other
hand, is an absence of light. It can be
read as a tear in the fabric, a black hole
that absorbs the light. So it has a kind of
metaphysical presence.
Untitled no. 3, 1976

In some paintings, I consciously thought

of the black as the body and the white
as the head, making geometry imitate nature. In other cases, this element reads as an
axonometric solid. You can perceive a black roof above a white front facade.
Incidentally, this reading is a violation of the Neo-Plastic avoidance of any scale
references, of any allusion to real dimensions or representational relationships.
Nevertheless, the possibility of illusion is key in my work. As you will discover,
sometimes I paint this element in a very muted way the white and the black look like
lost travelers in a huge landscape. In other cases, they are energetic and very
demanding perceptually; they become a perceptual irritant.
I am attracted to the hermetics of musical

structures. Music is an autonomous aesthetic

language. It follows its own internal logic of
instrumentation and composition. It has its
own elasticity of tempo: it can slow down or
accelerate in endless combinations. Of
course you do have composers in the early
and middle twentieth century who make
montages, who take the sounds of the city
and merge them into their compositions, as
John Cage does in his performance pieces, for
example. But I am much more attracted to J.
S. Bach. I find his impeccable compositions
lyrically complex, ever changing, mysterious.
He produced wondrous structures of sound.
For example, particularly in his keyboard
Grand fugue, 1974
music, there is a constantly engrossing
dialogue between treble and bass, a dualistic
interplay that Bach is a master of. He manages to weave treble into bass and bass
into treble you can think of the right hand being white and the left hand being black!
To me, Bach's pieces have an emotional impact that opens onto a spiritual otherness.
He liberates through the clarity of his musical structures. This clarity allows for lyrical
interpretations by the performer and the listener, adding second and third levels of
poetry.
I regard painting as being as hermetic as
music. Just as music is governed by its
own compositional rules and not
beholden to representation, so painting
should be able to enjoy an absolute
dissociation from the representational
world. The latter is expressed through the
illusion of foreground, middle ground, and
background, the world of perspectival
space. By excluding representation, an
illusion of another kind becomes
possible, which is the illusion of color and
shape. This is a unique freedom that
painting can enjoy; it is painting's
"musicality." Just as much as sound
Spiral no. 4, 1976
needs time to evolve into a musical
structure, so painting needs time as well,
"aesthetic time." Aesthetic time is the time that is needed to activate different spatial
constructs, and that is extendable by the viewer. I want the viewer to unravel the
complexity of a painterly structure, and at the same time I want to give a thematically
pronounced meaning to that structure. Of course, painting is a little more difficult to
isolate from the world than music because it is visual, and we live in a visual world.
Most of our perception of reality is gained through the eyes, and in a sense painting is
always competing with the visual field of the real.
I believe in painting's ability to
choreograph color and form in infinite
compositional variations. What I deal
with is polychromatic geometry.
Geometry is made to function in a
supportive way to the color concept.
Color also has an inherent structure of
its own; this structure has been
described in color atlases like the one
developed by Albert Munsell, for
example. Hue, value, and chroma are
the three coordinates of color reference.
They are like the Cartesian coordinates.
They can be visualized as a spatial
configuration that fits within not a perfect
globe but an asymmetrical spheroid. At

Sketch for Chromeclusters, 1974

the very top of this spheroid is white, at the bottom black. The poles are connected by
a spinal column of stepped grays, with middle gray residing on the "equator." The gray
steps are designated as values. Light emerges both in the differential between values
and in contiguous color relationships.
The color, value, and geometry of the
painting therefore feed back into each
other. This interaction is worked out in
the actual process of painting, the
proposition of which is constantly
changing. I start many of my paintings
with an initial sketch in which I notate
color within shape. I transpose the
sketch onto the canvas in a very thin,
tenuous, and watery way. I then begin to
alter shape, and a dance or duet
between drawing and color guides the
painting. I like to think of color as
something contained in jars and tubes,
to be released at the appropriate time,
Chromeclusters, 1974
when the spatial structure calls for it.
Color and drawing enter into a pas de
deux, and finally each holds its own. Most of the time color generates the idea of the
painting for me through its translation into geometry, its enactment of the three forces
of tension, compression, and shear, the primary elements of Neo-Plastic painting.
Mondrian articulated the aesthetics of
Neo-Plasticism as a doctrine. He
organized the canvas with nothing but
horizontal and vertical geometries and
used only a limited palette, all primaries.
He insisted on this, and when Van
Doesburg introduced diagonals in his own
compositions, the two stopped speaking.
It was a very dogmatic movement in
Holland! But what I admire in Mondrian is
not just the rigor of his Neo-Plastic
sensibility, but his stamina, his patience,
his search to enrich his own aesthetic
structures. When Mondrian came to the
United States in the early 1940s, he got
Guadaloupe Boogie-Woogie, 1956
turned on to the energies of New York
City, as you can feel for example in his
painting Broadway Boogie Woogie. The amount of spatial ambiguity and syncopation
is incredible. The painting is very polyphonic. You can almost hear the painting in all
its complexity. At first, Mondrian's paintings disturbed me a lot. I didnt like them so
much as a teenager. But when I began studying painting and drawing more seriously, I
saw their virtues. My discovery of his unfinished masterpiece, Victory Boogie-Woogie,
a square turned forty-five degrees into a diamond, was a major revelation, which in turn
triggered my acceptance of Neo-Plastic aesthetics.
So I developed a style of painting with
clear Neo-Plastic references. This goes
back to my three years at Yale in the
first half of the 1950s. Rather perversely,
given the strong influence of Josef Albers
there, I chose to restrict my palette to
Mondrian's primaries. Only in the early
'60s did I begin to accept the totality of
color.
While I was an art student at Yale I read
a lot of Gestalt psychology and got
acquainted with its terminology: figure
ground, figurefield, constellation,

Study, 195354

prgnanz, among others I found these

concepts very powerful.

A painting is about the dynamics of form on a two-dimensional surface. It is an act of

energizing the two-dimensional field. In my early paintings, it was the adjacent
relationship of colors and shapes in the horizontal and vertical dimension that created
aesthetic tension. It had to do with one form functioning in two, three, or four different
ways in the painting. This structuring of ambiguity is the kernel of the "transparency"
concept that I developed with Colin Rowe in our Transparency essays written at the
School of Architecture in Austin, Texas, around 195556. It has to do with the field
being a thickened, finite, colloidal support for multiple formal fragments, and a release
from the representational world.
I inherited my obsession with employing
figural elements in a very fragmentary
way not from Neo-Plasticism but from
early Cubism Braque, Picasso, and
especially Gris. Juan Gris was
responsible for a major pictorial
invention, namely the hermetics of stilllife structure, which he honed to a point
of pure poetry after 1915. He developed
a pictorial syntax based on diagonal
symmetries, in which still-life elements
engage the contained and finite matrix of
the flat canvas. They function in a very
different way from, say, Czanne's
apples and pears, which still refer to the
Homage to Gris, 1973
infinity of illusionistic space. For Gris,
finite space wins out in the end,
although within his conception of space infinite geometric and metaphorical extensions
become possible. The reason I mention Gris is that in the past I have called some of
my paintings Homage to Gris. They are also gray paintings. This is how extrinsic
references i.e., to the history of painting occasionally enter my work.

Untitled, 1994

I often work with the inherent

contradiction between the nine-square
and the sixteen-square grid. The one
has a void center and has to do with odd
numbers. The other has an intersecting
linear center and has to do with even
numbers. The nine-square is more
stable because of its central void, and it
implies a sanctified inner space, a
classic architectural courtyard or
cloister. The sixteen-square is unstable

Geometrically, the grid represents

repetition and stability. In addition, the
orthogonal grid is usually referable in my
paintings to primary colors: red, yellow,
blue, white, black. The geometry and the
color structure negotiate which element
is entitled at a particular moment to the
position of verticality, orthogonality, or
diagonality. I like to challenge the
painting's stability, as suggested by the
grids, and thus explore the instability of
stable form As such, some grids do not
appear to be plumb vertical in my
paintings, although they actually are so.
Only because of the sense of the
stability of grids can any rotation,
compression, or shear become
perceptible.

and implies infinite extension. Ideally, a

grid is dimensionless; it is an intellectual
construct. By fattening the lines of the
grid in some cases more than others
through form and color, I give the illusion
of distance or nearness; the grid
becomes haptic. If you look carefully,
your perception begins to evolve in time,
i.e., you begin to unravel the mystery of
the structure and, at the same time,
possibly to indulge in metaphoric
extensions of your vision.
I do indeed believe in the ineffability of
art. And I am particularly critical of
theories that try to be descriptive of, or

Untitled, 1986

Untitled, 1996

surrogates for, the work itself. To say

that art is ineffable means to eschew
interpreting visual stimuli in ways that
must by definition invoke the
representational world. Words tend to
act pictographically, particularly when
they convey metaphors. The metaphor
all of a sudden corrupts the possibility of
enjoying the painting free of any
representational associations. At the
same time, metaphor is an inescapable,
if fleeting, by-product of vision. Only the
most abstract language, like equational
logic in mathematics, can aspire to total
hermetics.
By allowing drips to show in some of my

recent paintings I am demonstrating the

liquidity of paint and the receptive quality
of canvas to the acrylics I use. The
dripping of color exposes the thinness of
the paint and the fragility of the plane.
Sometimes I try to make my paintings
look like decalcomany as if you could
peel the image off the surface. What is
more, liquidity is very structural.
Liquidity and absolute structure don't
deny each other. They mutually enhance
each other. Certainly dripping indicates
the presence of gravity and prevents you
from turning the canvas around (although
I have deliberately violated this rule on
Untitled, 1986
occasion). But the painting's orientation
also cannot be changed in my work
because of way I weight form. I like my forms to be heavier on top and lighter on the
bottom. The pull is important it's like pulling down a window shade. My effort to
flatten space and thus avoid deep space and representational space is aided by the
top-heavy elements.
In traditional painting space consists of
foreground, middle ground, background.
The foreground is at the bottom, the
middle ground is in the center, the
background is on top. This is earthsky
thinking! I want to put the earth where
the sky is and to put the sky where the
earth is, because I believe in the
autonomy of painting. I want to break

with representation in this way, to

interrupt the gestures reflexive to the
outside world, to favor self-referentiality
in painting. In this kind of painting, there
should be enough power in the
configuration of lines and color to keep
the eye spinning within the structure,
which is completely contained within the
frame of the field. At the same time,
within the contained field I try to imply
an infinite extension beyond the
painting's edges.

City, 1992

In my diamond paintings, which I did in

the mid '60s, and subsequently in my
tipped paintings, of the late '60s and
early '70s, I turned the canvas anywhere

from 45 to 5 degrees in order to provoke

a more active dialogue between the
orthogonal figural elements and the field.
The diamond paintings had a more
stable (but still volatile) quality because
of their right-angle armature. In the
tipped canvases, the turning caused a
thrust to the left or right, a haptic
gesture. In both cases the edges
became diaphanous, permitting the
illusion of penetrations from inside out
and outside in.
In my two most recent series, rather
than tip the canvas, I make some of the
painted elements themselves

Untitled, 1963

nonorthogonal. Thus I achieve the earlier

effects of destabilization and extension
solely through the illusionism of paint. In
these series I especially make use of
ricocheting chromatic vectors. These
implicate the edges of the painting,
causing them to appear either taut and
impenetrable or else soft and porous.
The two series are interrelated. In
general, the "pick-up stick" paintings are
about activating large sectors of field
colors and exploring relationships of
brightness and value. The "puzzle piece"
paintings involve a hide-and-seek game
with three pairs of complementaries that
Untitled, 1999
continuously superimpose, undercut,
and rescale each other. In the latter
series the floating fragments make the paintings a little slapstick. They have a
carnivalesque quality jovial, buoyant, celebratory.
For me the motivation in painting is very
similar to that in music. It is the desire
to break free from representational
images. I don't think you can name too
many pieces in music that start out with
the sound of kids playing in the
backyard. Instead, music starts off in a
"key" of some kind, then develops its
structure at a certain tempo, then
repeats this with variations. Music is
about playing with a theme turning it

upside down and inside out, taking it for

a ride.
I believe in the pleasure principle in
painting! I think Bach believed in the
elegance of sound in his preludes and
fugues. For him it was instrumentally
produced sound that generated
pleasure. For me it is color that is
geometrically structured. I am explaining
to you the effect of aesthetic time.
Which is to say, the longer you look, the
more you find; the more you find, the
longer you look. It's a nice reverse
equation. Painting is perceptual music.
It has to do with the retina. In music you
need an ear for sound. In painting you
need an eye for color within geometry.

Slapstick, 2001