The Brooklyn Rail

The range of works assembled in White Cube’s exhibition Al Held: About Space spans Held’s five-decade career, allowing us to survey the different, and increasingly complex, approaches the artist had for navigating pictorial space. He never took space to be simply a neutral container, but rather approached it as an endlessly manipulable envelope, understanding our perception of it as being conditioned and contextual. As such, Held was concerned with establishing ever more complex pictorial worlds in which viewers can roam and lose themselves.

The exhibition begins in 1959 with Taxi Cab IV, which demonstrates Held’s desire to integrate the seemingly opposed aesthetic programs of a particular art historical moment. In this case the gestural brushwork still current in the late 1950s with the kinds of optical effects also then coming into prominence, via high-keyed colors and geometric forms. Held’s approach, however varied, yokes color and optical effects via a geometric matrix, typically one loosely based on a grid, which establishes a throughline across the diverse works included in this exhibition.

The space in the large paintings Held made after a pivotal 1981 trip to Rome is expansive, but only in some cases, such as Eagle Rock IV (2004), is it infinite. Often, as in See Through IV (2002), optically undulating forms are rendered as grids, which we find wrap the space and make it room-like, even on a massive, monumental scale. Indeed, the orientation of Held’s spaces is towards interiors, and most often conveys a sense of enclosure, even when monumental. The kinds of geometric forms that popped and locked in the 1960s and the ’70s have become free floating in works like Black Nile VII (1974). The taut flatness that marked the earlier paintings fully dissolved in favor of pulsating fields, as in D-Y (1979), which is filled with various floating, brightly hued, geometric forms. The overall effect is architectural, but also dreamlike, an alternate reality governed—we sense—by somewhat different gravitational and other relational forces.

Working in a large format allowed Held to explore different kinds of spaces, which the different scales on view allow us to compare. We see that over time Held worked to further concretize the space, primarily by giving body to the objects within it. This happened through color, imbuing a sense of volume to what in the earlier black-and-white work had functioned as armature. In those pieces, such as Black Nile VII, the viewer’s eye was constantly activated, and even when the work is large, the movement of the viewer’s body serves to change what is happening in the eye, thus yoking eye and body together, with the eye as the primary driver.

In the colorful canvases of the 1970s into the ’80s, as illusionism increased, so too did imaginative space for the viewer’s body. No longer relegating the body as simply a device for the activation of the eye, via the eye the viewer could imagine their body inhabiting and moving around in one of Held’s brightly hued spaces. To contemporary eyes these works evoke the virtual spaces of digital renderings. Provocatively, they predate such technology, revealing a longer prehistory. This prehistory is tied to the longstanding notion of a painting as presenting alternate forms of reality. Ever-prescient critic Irving Sandler already noted this in his 1984 monograph on Held, when he wrote that, “It is ironic that Held’s pictures should at one and the same time call to mind Renaissance paintings and science-fiction space-age imagery—suspended between past and future, as it were.”

Scale again functions as a primary differentiator between Held’s paintings and the digital spaces they might suggest, as well as the physicality of the works with their dense, slick surfaces comprised of many sanded-down layers of paint. Today we are used to devices as small as a smartphone opening up onto endless vistas, but Held shows his indebtedness to the mass address of grand Renaissance art and architecture—its frescos, churches, and palazzos—in the immense scale of his works, which matches well with the vastness of White Cube’s Bermondsey gallery. They are thus enveloping in a way we are not used to, allowing us a different view onto the conditions of our time, even if they are in fact far removed from Held’s impulses in making the work. They allow us to acknowledge how our fantasies and projections are ultimately rooted in the perceptual dynamics of the real world, and the role paintings, such as Held’s, have in continuing to test and allow us access to these visual mechanics even as contexts change.