The Brooklyn Rail

“In my beginning is my end.” T.S. Eliot’s linking of life to death, that all living is merely a protracted dying, comes ironically to the point of this show, simultaneously superb and heart-rending because Sam Gilliam died in 2022 and will paint no more. A show called The Last Five Years invites speculation about late work, about the end of a practice. Thinking about death, decline, and the last gasp of a career led a dying Edward Said (1935–2003) to meditate on late style: “These issues, which interest me for obvious personal reasons, have led me to look at the way in which the work of some great artists and writers acquires a new idiom towards the end of their lives—what I’ve come to think of as a late style.” Said’s essay is fraught with melancholy, the idea that at the end of a life an artist might in a sense turn against their earlier work. The example of Beethoven’s last six quartets comes to the point, compositions seemingly written for the future of music rather than its present moment since they were met with utter incomprehension.

Sam Gilliam will have none of that. These twenty-four works produced between 2021 and 2022 seem to be by an artist with his whole life before him. There is no break with previous eras of work, simply a return to well-trodden ground, to modalities he’d worked in before: the beveled edge paintings of the sixties and seventies, the watercolors on washi, also from the sixties, and the tondo paintings he showed at the Hirshhorn Museum in 2022. (We will have to wait until January 2024 for a show of his drape paintings at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles.) To conclude that Gilliam produced the work being shown at Pace in a moment of denial, as if to negate his mortality, that a return to the past would cancel out an inevitable future, would imply despair. This work has nothing to do with anxiety and everything to do with vocation: Gilliam was going to follow his calling until the light went out.

The idea behind beveling the edges of the canvas was, ostensibly, to make the painting more like sculpture, to raise it off the wall. True enough, but another effect is to call attention to paint itself. Gilliam’s canvases have such intriguing surfaces that we are often tempted to run our fingers over them, perhaps to engage in a bizarre form of phrenology to see what lurks below those varied plains. It is in that fascinating surface where we find the technique that identifies a Gilliam painting. Let’s call it punctuation because it divides the canvas and makes it coherent. Take The Business (2022), a 96-by-96-by-4-inch piece: the dominant color is blue, making us “read” the canvas from left to right. But it is the green that appears on the upper and lower edges along with the right side that interrupts (punctuates in that sense) the blue to establish a rhythm, a beat that imposes order on apparent chaos. In Like Sounds (2021), the interruptions, hashmarks on all sides of this heavily white canvas, are more apparent and their significance more obvious. The title takes us to music, the pulsation that gives unity to so much Abstract Expressionist painting, especially that of Jackson Pollock.

Gilliam’s use of tondos is more enigmatic. A feature of Greek vase painting, a classicizing aspect of Renaissance painting (Raphael), it calls attention to a geometric shape charged with significance. The plane of a canvas could theoretically be extended to infinity, but the circle is a unity enclosed within itself. Three of the four tondos included here are untitled and are divided into quadrants, while the fourth, Lucky (2021) shares its beveled edges with the square or rectangular pieces. The three tondos divided into four parts suggest a compass, a control over direction, while Lucky, with its more chaotic surface, implies chance. This play of order (the quadrants) against controlled disorder—Lucky, despite its passions, is enclosed—might be an eloquent commentary on Gilliam recognizing the end is near but holding it all together to finality.
The seven watercolors on washi constitute a show unto themselves. Five are named Annie (all 2022), presumably after Annie Gawlak, Gilliam’s wife, while two are untitled. The rectangular (on a vertical axis) shape of these works recalls the kakemono style in Japanese scroll art. The upper section in that tradition is called heaven, the bottom earth, and a central axis runs the length of the scroll. Gilliam’s watercolors follow that pattern with a nod toward the English watercolor landscape tradition. In one Annie, we see a plant-like stem rising through the swirls of color, an affirmation perhaps of life and a fitting denouement for this magnificent show.