David Novros: Wall Paintings by PaulaCooperGallery

DAVID NOVROS Wall Paintings

David Novros and Rainer Judd at 101 Spring Street in the early 1970s.

Topos Non Topos: Notes On David Novros Ann Lauterbach

1. Being Here Now I’ve been thinking about the word place; about the fact that it is, like so many English words, both a noun and a verb. Things are, or are not, in the right place. I placed a jar in Tennessee, Wallace Stevens begins his poem “Anecdote of the Jar”, in which that placed jar, an artifact in the slovenly wilderness, takes dominion everywhere. When I think about a word, I like to know its etymology; how it has traveled across space-time as a linguistic artifact. These inquiries often lead to a sense of animation, as if a word had some creaturely vitality, changing and adapting to its surroundings, its use: place (n) c. 1200, “space, dimensional extent, room, area,” from Old French place “place, spot” (12c.) and directly from Medieval Latin placea “place, spot,” from Latin platea “courtyard, open space; broad way, avenue,” from Greek plateia (hodos) “broad (way),” fem. of platys “broad,” from PIE root *plat- “to spread.” The Internet has of course radically altered our sense of place, so that the question where are you? has an almost metaphysical resonance, and the little word here is far out of earshot. What was it Gertrude Stein said after visiting her home town, Oakland? There is no there there. Now we might say there is no here here. The satellite-strewn sky has made a new constellation of our bearings; its dominion, everywhere. We have entered an era of collapsed dichotomies: time/space, private/public, near/far appear to be dissolving into mutating continuums without fixed points. Here and there are as fictions in an ancient practice; so much of what we, in the rich West, experience is now rendered on a glossy flat

surface with a tiny thin line blinking, as if to mimic your heart’s pulse. Distance is negated; history, the retrieval of events through time, a contested array of entanglements across acts of inclusion and exclusion. How our individual choices and decisions might fold out into a shared sense, a public consensus, appears to be as urgent as it is unanswerable. 2. Aura It is the painted place that is closest to my heart.1 David Novros was born and grew up in Los Angeles, city of angels and the moving image; both his parents and his brother Paul were engaged in film. He was tempted to become a filmmaker, but after attending the Yale Norfolk Summer School in 1961, where he would meet Brice Marden and other painters, he made a commitment to painting. His fellow students were full of optimistic energy, believing, as Novros has said, “they could do something” 2 at a time when many artists and critics were wondering if so-called “easel painting” had a viable future at all. Almost from the beginning of his long career, painting, for Novros, has entailed a further engagement with place. This interest and subsequent practice began as a result of early journeys to Europe, where, in 1963, he first saw the astonishing tile inlays of Granada’s Alhambra palace. As he recalls, “Seeing the Alhambra in Granada was an extraordinary experience for me. It was the first time that I understood painting as something other than an object hanging on a wall. I thought that paintings could be in a fixed place, made for that place, made of the light of the place, experienced kinesthetically.” 3 Seeing Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, and those of Fra Angelico in San Marco, would further alter his sense of painting as a detachable rectangle, and register the wonderful insight that “illusion could be totally synonymous with physical reality.” 4 The Italian frescoes also brought a new awareness of narrative, as verbal tales unfolded across a series of visual scenes, their imagined tableaus revealed on the entablature of a chapel’s embracing walls. In these wall depictions, narrative, Novros would come to realize, has a dual nature: the sequential images are activated by the spectator moving across and through the physical space, and remembering the experience of each place in the process. This early journey in Europe would inform all his subsequent thinking. As he says, “nothing had prepared me for the power of the places that I went to see. I had never thought of paintings made of glass or mosaic, paintings that incorporated the light, architecture, and landscape, and, of course I never imagined a completely painted place like the Scrovegni chapel. I was seeing painting that was wedded to both a place and a purpose. Since then I have seen many painted places. I have seen the caves of Cantabria and the Dordogne as

well as the painted walls of the Hueco tanks. I have seen the Alhambra and Romanesque frescoes. Painted rooms at Teotihuacan and the Sistine Chapel.” 5 Paintings are material reliquaries of presence; someone made these marks on this surface. Long before there was canvas and bars on which to stretch it, there were indentations in rocks; there were houses, churches and palaces with walls, and ceilings, and floors. There was a hand and an implement—a stick, a knife, a brush—and a liquid stain. Place affirms context; cultures arise in specific geographies, and those cultures are preserved in their architecture and artifacts. Once those objects are moved, they lose, as Walter Benjamin told us, their aura. Aura, for Benjamin, was felt as an awareness of how a unique work of art instantiated ritual, spiritual belief, magic—“cult” was his word— which, finally, assured the endurance of a tradition.6 Once works of art could be reproduced and moved, this apprehension of their indigenous ceremonial aura would vanish, to

David Novros, untitled, 1970, pigments ground in water on a wall made out of sand and calcium carbonate, 162 × 204 inches, 101 Spring Street, New York.

be replaced, according to Benjamin, by a newly demotic distribution: art available to all. The agents of this new aesthetic liberation were, most obviously, film and photography. Benjamin was writing in the 1930s, at a time of acute political turmoil, when fascist energies threatened Europe's democracies, decades before the global markets of capitalism’s monetary exchange became the hegemonic order of accepted value; long before the Internet dematerialized the world. Our contemporary awareness has shifted radically. The often rapacious removal of works from their cultural home, their place of origin, has led to protracted demands for their return. 3. Doubt as Process When a painter steps outside this world of markets, and begins to confront the experience of making work that isn’t validated as a commodity, he becomes vulnerable and that’s good. He must think about not only what he is painting, but also why. And, this thinking must question all the conventions learned in schools, art galleries, museums, etc.7 The “world of markets” is an abstraction, so to step outside of it means in fact to step inside, into an actual place, say a studio, where every artist must encounter basic questions: not only why make art? but how? In his interviews and writings, David Novros frequently uses words that indicate a fundamental awareness: that creative thinking is never simply rational, but entails intuitions that inform a continuing dialogue between the artist and work. He described this process to The Brooklyn Rail: “I don’t have any particular system. Sometimes I paint one area of a painting for years—trying to find the ‘right’ light. I keep working till the painting gives me permission to move on. The image is only one part of the painting and if that were the only thing it would be easy to ‘finish’ but the totality is more complicated and seems to take me longer. I think I am coming close to an understanding of what I’m trying to do and that allows me to continue.” 8 I keep working till the painting gives me permission to move on. All acts of art-making involve choices and decisions that arise from a vulnerable uncertainty, an openness to doubt fueled by curiosity. That Novros believes in the “good,” the necessity, of such vulnerability might strike us as contrarian. After all, our received idea of his generation of artists

tells us they rejected outright signs of such subjective feelings—vulnerability, doubt—in favor of a kind of sublime objectivity inhering in the literal materials and processes of the work itself. It was a time of ideation and concept over surface facture, compositional complexity, expressive gesture, with their ever-attendant critical hermeneutics. An artwork, they claimed, should register wholeness; its surface uninflected by either interior variation or spatial illusion. What you see is what you see, Frank Stella famously remarked. Interlude : from Place to Place In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I lived in London. It was there, at the Tate Gallery, that I first saw Frank Stella's so-called “black paintings”. They reminded me of the fabric of pinstripe suits but they also had an almost mesmeric, static, calm; a kind of mute assertiveness. While in London, I worked at the ICA in Nash House on The Mall. There, an exhibition called "When Attitudes Become Form", curated by Harald Szeemann (which had originated at the Bern Kunsthalle in 1969) opened in our main gallery. I was tasked with writing about this bewildering, visually diffuse show. I arranged to meet one of the artists, Carl Andre, in a pub in north London. I asked him to explain. He took a pen and made, on a slip of paper—a napkin?—a grid of eight squares. He numbered the grid, 1, 2, 3, 4 along the edge. At the top he wrote: YES NO. Then he wrote: choose one. I reprinted this gnomic message in the Eventsheet. The main contemporary art magazine in London then was Studio International, edited by a white-haired gentleman, Peter Townsend. It was in Studio International that I read a review by Donald Judd of a Barnett Newman painting; it took up a long wide column down one of the large pages. In this review, Judd described, in minute inch by inch detail, the visual elements of the painting; it was one of Newman's “Zip” works. At no point did Judd mention subject-matter; nothing about Jewish mysticism but, nevertheless, he wrote, “It's a complex painting.” 9 Complexity, for Judd, was a matter of form. When I returned to New York in the early 1970s, I lived for a while on the corner of Spring Street and West Broadway, in a small loft rented on the top floor with a single garret window, facing north. In those days, it was possible for aspiring artists to buy abandoned raw loft spaces for their studios; some, like Donald Judd, were able to buy entire buildings; purchased in 1968, his was only a few blocks east, at the corner of Spring and Mercer Streets. It was just as the neighborhood was shifting from light industry to the newly-christened center of a rapidly expanding art world; the phrase itself was new. There were a few galleries, and then more, and then many. Paula Cooper was there, on Wooster Street. 420 West Broadway, housing (Leo) Castelli and (Ileana) Sonnabend, John Weber and Andre Emmerich had recently opened, attracting well-dressed persons in long black town cars, oddly anomalous among the trucks and loading docks and the mostly impe-

cunious cohort of young artists—composers, actors, dancers, poets, painters—who came in search of cheap studios and a sense of community. There were very few shops selling pretty things, and very few places to eat or drink. The overriding sense was that anything was possible; that the streets, the ground level, were sites of chance and change, a sort of mutating human weather made from ingenuity, opportunity, and the volatile, mingling logics of idealism and ambition, politics and practice.

David Novros, Four Seasons, 1973-74, oil on canvas, 4 panels, overall: 138 1/4 x 448 7/8 in. (351 x 1140 cm). Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany.

5. Narrative Light David Novros’s focus on place is not inflected by a sentimental attachment to what was; it is not guided by a sense of home, of belonging. Place signifies for him what endures; where any person, any public, might come to pass by, stop, and look, at any time. His work presents us with an ongoing dialogue between duration, as place, and transitory movement: bodies in space and the shifting light cast across and into it. When you walk through once familiar streets whose denizens, shops, bars, and frontages have radically changed, what stays as felt residue is scale, the relational distance between things; block to block; corner to corner; house to house. In New York’s SoHo, the

surface transformations over the past fifty years were as rapid as they were total. But the architectural bones are still there in the iconic 19th century cast-iron buildings, with their high ceilings and enormous windows. I took the subway from Penn Station to Spring Street, and walked east, past my old dwelling, through the late summer crowds of tourists to The Judd Foundation. What was once Donald Judd’s home is now a permanent installation of that home. Donald Judd died in 1994. The second floor is reached up a long, worn wooden staircase inside the 1870 original cast-iron building. Neither shrine, nor replica, nor museum, the carefully tended and preserved urban home of a single artist forces one to consider the most basic questions, about the meaning of material objects in our lives, about the difference between animate bodies and inanimate things in a given place. The Novros fresco, commissioned by his friend Donald Judd in 1969, spans the entire south-east wall, perpendicular to the huge south-facing windows, and across from a bank of west-facing windows which cast an ambient light into the vast room. The fresco is a monumental display of rectangular shapes in an uneven grid pattern of a delicately calibrated palette. The eye moves across and down; it sees the entire image and then it looks at individual parts; a shift in focus, flexed between far and near, between wide scan and the arrested detail. If one were to move to a close-up look for such detail, one would find the residue of the act of fabrication: how did he make the lines so straight? A cartoon was made; tiny holes, “pouncing”, applied. There are what look to be remnant traces of taping. In several of the rectangles, a scumbling effect, in which more than one color is visible, caused by pulling wet pigmented material with a flat Japanese brush, making slightly uneven striations in the application. Novros, working with a plasterer, completed the fresco over two days. It represented the apotheosis of his fundamental ambition to merge painting with place. The viewer regards the immobile wall. The viewer moves. The light moves. On the day I visited, the sky was overcast, the light evenly distributed, which seemed to emphasize the fresco’s matte saturated surface. But at one point, the sun came out, and a wash of light ignited the panels, slicing diagonally across the wall and briefly casting a watery pattern, caused by the old glass of the immense windows. The fresco, I thought, is indifferent to me; it is in dialogue not with the spectator, but with the light. Light: simultaneously touching the moment’s place, and recursive across time and space. And I recalled that Novros had always been drawn to the effects of light; he had earlier discovered Murano, an industrial material with a reflective, pearlescent finish in which the colors would shift with the angle of vision. He says, “I felt that this Murano stuff was consistent with the kinesthetic experience of the painting. Because you never saw the painting the same way from any one place. It forced you to move along the painting in order to experience it, to see the way the light was going to interact with the material.” 10 As Matthew

Levy comments, the effect of the Murano pigment was to produce “an Interstitial halation that made the walls appear as if they were somehow painted with light.” 11 The Judd fresco has three different shades of blue. One on the upper left, one toward the middle, and one on the lower right. The upper left blue is the darkest and most densely saturated, calling to mind the astonishing blue of Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel.12 Novros has noted that Giotto’s blue continues across the chapel’s entire interior, uniting formal structure to its literary subject-matter. In his Judd fresco, this initial, opening blue is a visual anchor to the unfurling distribution of colors. As Matthew Levy has observed, “In its tiered structure, Novros’s fresco is reminiscent of Giotto’s bands in the Scrovegni Chapel. However, in the place of biblical narrative, one encounters a wholly non-figurative configuration of color and form—a renewal of abstract painting under the regime of material specificity.” 13 The mind’s eye might find recourse to the earlier, figurative work, and bring it forward, collapsing temporal and spatial distance into a single, linked, experience. Narrative is present as visual, physical sequence and as vivid recollection. Across his long career, Novros has critiqued and resisted the idea of a painting as a private possession, one whose ownership and value is dictated by the market. Art, he insists, should be an experience available to all. The “painted place” is at once an aesthetic choice and an ethical, political commitment. Since the Judd fresco, Novros has continued to make works that explore the relation between paintings and their architectural setting.14 Some of these were site-specific commissions; others are interlinked panels in which the wall often plays an integral part in the visual field. Among these is the monumental “portable mural” Four Seasons (1973-74, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany) which consists of a sequence of four paintings that are visually connected to each other, each one a vivid catalytic awakening of our sensuous awareness not only of where we are but of how color is invariably the touchstone of that awareness. Suddenly, a “landscape” appears as a geometrical array of subtly modulated chromatic essences (distantly reminiscent of Mondrian’s cityscapes). Here, darkest blues, purples and blacks shift positions across the four panels, suggesting deep space, shadow, and object, each distinct, and yet all at once in a stunning conflation of temporal-spatial elements. 6. Expression In '67 I began using a right angle form almost exclusively. It was for me very expressive.15 One of the signal traits of American artists affiliated with Minimalism was a deliberate subtraction of expression from abstraction. How, we might want to know, is a right angle, this most rigid geometric figure, expressive?

There are eleven panels in Asturias 1 (2022) but there are more than thirty-five right angles, some within the structure itself and some at the outer edges, a veritable bonanza of recapitulating closed and open corners. The upper strata enclose four rectangles of (wall) space; the lower four vertical legs are open, without a horizontal bar, so the eye drops downward to the floor’s flat horizon and then rides back up, as if gravity were reversed by the powerful pull of color, united to geometrical shape. Looking at this painting, I recall Roland Barthes' stirring notion of the punctum in a photograph. He claimed that there is an element in a photograph, often overlooked, which “is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” 16 This element then alters how we experience the whole image, which Barthes called the studium. In the Novros painting, the punctum is not hidden, nor unintentional; in fact, it implies a certain indeterminacy within the overall field of decisive alterations of color annealed to the individual structural components. One vertical panel begins as a muted orange and travels downward without inflection until the orange changes gradually to an olive greenish-brown. What to make of this anomalous chromatic blur? The value of the pigments throughout are close, deeply saturated; each color striking in its lush beauty, reminiscent, perhaps, of Rothko’s similarly subtle distribution of color. Novros has written and spoken often of his admiration for Rothko. Perhaps the punctum, the brushy transition from hue to hue, is an homage, a poignant reminder of Rothko’s meditative fields of molten color.17 The “open” or empty rectangles might call to mind windows and doors, but this easy reference is quickly thwarted; there are no interiors; there is only the wall, integral to the picture. The figure is the ground; the painting is both on the wall and of the wall. The arrested visual object (the painting in place) gives way, opens onto, its surrounding, and the viewer becomes alert to incipient or implied motion, one that suggests multiple variations, multiple combinations between and among the picture’s adamant geometry. The right angles afford a variety of possible configurations: singles and doubles, open and closed, unequal parts and partitions, all of which activate the colors in a kinesthetic visual pattern. The four descending “legs” hover above the floor, their shadows reflected, their colors a muddied immaterial shimmer; a real illusion! The optical and the structural fuse in a syncopated visual array that is as suggestive as it is formal. The expressivity of the right angle is found in its structural power; the rigid form’s insistence on holding in place the painting’s stunning pattern of colors. But this word, holding, is incorrect. Nothing is being held. The painted panels are shapes which hold nothing; they surround, they frame, they unframe, segments of the wall. Frame, wall, and painting are merged in a brilliant, unsettled ambiguity. In Asturias 3 (2022), color is the active element, determining an animated, restless

visual play, almost agitated in the concert of repetitions. Three blue elements occur, so similar in hue that they might be the same, but for their location. Context is everything; colors are the same and different depending on the light that strikes them, depending on neighboring, adjacent colors. There are, also, three incidents of yellow; three of brown; three of black. Three colors occur only once; and one, a pale green situated in the middle of the work, twice. Green, in Novros's work, seems to carry a specific resonance of meaning; perhaps a key to the internal conversation among intersecting parts. As in many Italian frescoes, and as in the Judd mural, a pale, indefinite green seems to have its own inner luminosity. Perhaps this cool atmospheric color signals mutable nature, the final setting that houses and includes us, as we pass between animate motion and inanimate stillness. Structure claims its place; color and light animate our awareness of being here now. This is David Novros’s supreme achievement: radiant structures of movement and arrest; glimpses of a finite infinitude. Topos non topos. Notes 1. David Novros, “Painted Places and Patronage,” The Brooklyn Rail, June 2011. Transcript of a talk given in Houston, Texas on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Rothko Chapel, February 12, 2011. 2. David Novros, “In Conversation: David Novros with Phong Bui,” The Brooklyn Rail, June 2008. 3. Ibid. 4. Matthew L. Levy, Abstract Painting and the Minimalist Critiques: Robert Mangold, David Novros, and Jo Baer in the 1960s (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 120. This highly detailed and informative work is invaluable. 5. David Novros, “Painted Places and Patronage.” 6. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968). 7. David Novros, “Death, Ownership, and Public Art” The Brooklyn Rail, October 2013. Transcript of a talk given to a conference of restorers, Miami, 2003. 8. Novros, “In Conversation: David Novros with Phong Bui.” 9. Donald Judd, “Barnett Newman,” in Studio International, no. 919 (February 1970) 10. David Novros, Interview by Elizabeth Lunning, et al., September 12, 2005, Artist Documentation Program, Video Interview Transcript, The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas. 11. Levy, 111. 12. T.J. Clark, in Heaven on Earth (2018), writing about Giotto’s use of blue, remarks, “Blue was an entity the eye could touch.” 13. Levy, 123. 14. These include site-specific works at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1972); the Burgunder House, Fire Island (1973); Rice University, Houston (1973-75); Pennzoil Oil Corporation, Houston (1975); University of Texas Health Science Center, Dallas (1977); the Doumani House, Venice, California (1981); the former Miami Federal Courthouse, Miami (1984-1984); Newark Train Station, Newark (1984); College of Charleston, Charleston (1990); the Gross House, Winslow, Arizona (1996-97); a private Boathouse, Middleburgh, New York (1996-2003); the studio of Robert Graham, Venice, California (2007); and the Wiesbaden Museum, Germany (2012-2016). 15. Novros, “In Conversation: David Novros with Phong Bui.” 16. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 42-45. 17. There are several commentaries on Novros’s relation to The Rothko Chapel. Among them, Frauke V. Josenhaus, ed., Artists and the Rothko Chapel: 50 Years of Inspiration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).

WORKS

Study for Asturias 1, 2021 watercolor & graphite on paper 12 1/4 x 16 1/8 in. (31.1 x 41 cm)

Study for Asturias 2, 2021 watercolor & graphite on paper 12 1/4 x 16 1/8 in. (31.1 x 41 cm)

Study for Asturias 3, 2021 watercolor & graphite on paper 12 1/4 x 16 1/8 in. (31.1 x 41 cm)

Study for Asturias 4, 2021 watercolor & graphite on paper 16 1/8 x 12 1/4 in. (41 x 31.1 cm)

Asturias 1, 2022 oil on canvas 11 panels, overall: 11 ft 6 in. x 14 ft 9 in. (350.5 x 449.6 cm)

Asturias 2, 2022 oil on canvas 20 panels, overall: 11 ft 3 in. x 15 ft (342.9 x 457.2 cm)

Asturias 3, 2022 oil on canvas 18 panels, overall: 13 ft 9 in. x 15 ft (419.1 x 457.2 cm)

Asturias 4, 2022 oil on masonite panel 19 panels, overall: 12 ft 9 in. x 10 ft 3 in. (388.6 x 312.4 cm)

FURTHER STUDIES

Study for Asturias, 2021 watercolor & graphite on paper 12 1/8 x 16 1/8 in. (30.8 x 41 cm)

Study for Asturias, 2021 watercolor & graphite on paper 16 x 12 1/2 in. (40.6 x 31.8 cm)

Published by PJC on the occasion of the exhibition: DAVID NOVROS: Wall Paintings Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 W 21st Street, New York October 28–December 2, 2023 Edited by Daisy Charles Designed by Steven Probert Printed by Meridian Printing, Rhode Island in 250 copies ISBN: 979-8-218-29311-6 Artwork © 2023 David Novros / Artist Rights Society (ARS) Text © 2023 Ann Lauterbach Catalogue © 2023 Paula Cooper Gallery Photo Credits: p.2: Julia Fahey, Courtesy Judd Foundation Archives; p. 5: Adam Bartos; p. 8 Fred Dott; p. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18-19, 20-21, 22-23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30: Steven Probert All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner without written permission of the artists, authors, or publisher. Paula Cooper Gallery 534 W 21st Street, New York, NY 10011 Tel 212 255 1105 Fax 212 255 5156 www.paulacoopergallery.com