In Robert Ryman, One Color With the

Power of Many
By ROBERTA SMITHDEC. 10, 2015

For nearly 60 years, the Minimalist painter Robert Ryman has had few equals when it comes to
doing more with less. White has been his primary, if not quite his only, color, the square his
typical format. And yet within these seeming limitations a remarkably fecund and resonant body
of work has evolved, as demonstrated by a small but comprehensive exhibition at Dia:Chelsea on
West 22nd Street.

Succinct, beautifully installed and bathed in natural light, this show is a great way for the Dia Art
Foundation to re-enter the curatorial life of the New York City art world, which under its new
director, Jessica Morgan, it seems intent on doing.

This is Dias first exhibition in Chelsea since 2004, when the financial debacle of its grandiose
new outpost in Beacon, N.Y., forced the foundation to close (and eventually sell) its main
exhibition space in Chelsea and rent out the other, where Ryman is now installed. Since then, Dia
has had two directors and started to raise money for a new building in Chelsea. But soon after
Ms. Morgans arrival, Dia shelved these plans, rightly deciding to make do with the spaces it
already owns and get on with the shows.

In truth, Mr. Ryman, who turned 85 in May, has not exactly devoted himself simply to square all-
white paintings. As seen at Dia, his works are full of hints and tints of color made all the richer
by the surrounding paleness. His whites are many and his paint-handling often lush in a deadpan
sort of way. He has also taken broad liberties with materials which add their own colors
using so many different ones, sparingly, that hes a veritable maximalist in this regard.

As the works here confirm, he has painted not only on canvas and linen (stretched and
unstretched) but also on fiberglass, Plexiglas, handmade paper and aluminum. (His first
aluminum work, which dates from around 1964 is here: a 14-inch square that he burnished,
creating a brushy turbulence before applying thick patches of white over dark blue paint.)

To these various surfaces, Mr. Ryman has applied oil and acrylic as well as casein, enamelac and
a vinyl polymer, using all manner of brushes and other tools. Usually his fields of paint flirt with,
but never reach, the edges: What lies beneath is always visible. In several works here, he exposes
the underlying material by pushing the painted field into one corner or another. This is clearest in
an untitled 1973 work, in which five 8-inch squares of copper, each with a white square of
enamel baked onto the upper right corner, reveal fat Ls of oxidized metal.
Despite the variety of materials, Mr. Ryman has remained true to the basic definition of a
painting as a flat surface with four corners to which paint or something like it is applied. That
this surface is then traditionally attached to a larger flat surface the wall has also not
escaped his attention.

So the Dia show includes a stretched canvas held a few inches in front of the wall by steel
fasteners and an unstretched canvas stapled directly to it. Finder from 1976, is a painting on
Plexiglas attached with black bolts. Next to it, Post, on aluminum-polyethylene, uses nearly
identical bolts, except theyre plain.

In an unusually extreme move, Mr. Ryman affixes Pair Navigation, a painting on fiberglass
perpendicular to the wall, supporting its outer edge with short metal rods, evoking a very low
foldout table. Peering down at its whiteness, you know that theres nothing about this medium
that the artist has not pushed out of whack. Consistent with this all-out scrutiny, his signature is
often a prominent part of the whole.

Mr. Ryman was born in Nashville in 1930 and took up painting rather suddenly in 1953. After
serving in the Army, he went to New York intending to be a jazz saxophonist, studying with
Lennie Tristano. But he needed to support himself and landed a job as a security guard at the
Museum of Modern Art. There he evidently fell under paintings spell, especially the big
canvases of American Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston.
One day he went to an art supply store near his apartment, bought some paint and canvas, and
went to work.

This is Mr. Rymans first museum exhibition in New York City since his big retrospective at the
Museum of Modern Art in 1993. Its 22 works suggest that his undertaking may be clearer in
smaller, not larger, amounts. This modest number feels comprehensive, because it does not have
to account for a typically linear development from Point A to B and onward.

In effect, Mr. Ryman has spent his career circling Point A, proving that there are an infinite
number of ways to meet paintings basic requirements. The works here range in date from 1958
to 1985. They have been selected and arranged unchronologically in telling pairs and trios by
Courtney J. Martin, the adjunct curator at Dia and an art historian at Brown University, working
with Megan Holly Witko, Dias assistant curator.

It didnt take Mr. Ryman long to understand his art as the exploration and expos of the perhaps
timeless basics of painting, restated in materials both traditional and new, even industrial. In the
first work here Untitled #17 from 1958 the textured white oil paint recalls abstract
Guston, while a faint line of blue fissuring down the surface is reminiscent of Clyfford Stills
craggy abstractions. Along one side, a strip of canvas is sliced off, revealing the bright orange of
the wood stretcher. (The sides of Mr. Rymans works often show unexpected signs of attention.
They dont necessarily match; they have odd touches of paint.)

On the opposite wall, an untitled painting made four years later, in 1962, shows Ryman at full
force. A field of juicy white strokes, clearly applied one at a time, partly cover ones of blue and
rust red, which glimmer through, along with the raw linen beneath them all. The totality is
wonderfully alive, recalling Pollock, van Gogh and Monet.

It helps to think of Mr. Ryman as a kind of philosopher-carpenter with an inborn, almost mystical
love of paint as paint. He wants us to understand its sensuousness while he demonstrates that
paintings are in effect built from scores of decisions and details, and then proceeds to
challenge our definition of his medium. Is this a painting? Is that a painting? could be taken
as the main credo of his art. He doesnt always provide easy answers.

Among the least assuming, yet most challenging paintings is Catalyst III, from 1985, a small
work of anodized aluminum, nearly two feet square, that seems almost machine-made. Its
meager painted elements consist of thin, mechanically crisp lines and bars of blue enamel,
mostly along the edges but also trisecting the surface horizontally.

Looking at these divisions and the unpainted gaps along the edges, it is possible to imagine that
the golden section determined the intervals. Except that the upper horizontal line is notched clear
across with quick tiny strokes of white that suggest sharp, crazed little teeth. They disrupt the
paintings perfection but recede, almost like a hallucination, as you pull away.

Each of Mr. Rymans paintings is a riddle of physical facts, choices and details as well as optical
experiences. The more you look, the more you see, and learn about the way an artists mind
works, how it moves around a painting front, back and sides touching and considering
every point no matter how small, and leaving little signs. Ryman was here; you were, too.

Robert Ryman runs through July 29 at Dia:Chelsea, 545 West 22nd Street, Chelsea; 212-989-
5566, diaart.org.