The Brooklyn Rail

A pioneer of lyrical abstraction, Ronnie Landfield has painted nearly every day for more than sixty years. One feels that processual mastery in this exquisite show, which punctuates a suite of recent works with earlier gems that suggest both the continuity and evolution of his practice. Illuminated with color, the gallery turns kaleidoscopic as the viewer spins round absorbing the radiance of Landfield’s jewel-toned canvases.

Working in the tradition of Color Field painting pioneered by Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Landfield’s practice involves pouring and staining. Decades younger than these trailblazers, Landfield began painting a decade after Frankenthaler’s breakthrough painting Mountains and Sea (1952). As a teenager, Landfield experimented with gestural expressionism and hard-edge abstraction. By the late 1960s, he was making wall-sized pour paintings that conjure cosmic landscapes despite their creation in the artist’s post-industrial downtown studios. Far from being fit for history’s dustbin, the radical art experiments of the countercultural period remain a source of ongoing inspiration. Originally bought by architect Philip Johnson, and then donated to and exhibited at MoMA, Landfield’s magisterial 1969 painting Diamond Lake is overdue for returning to view in the museum’s galleries.

As if observing the Old Testament’s prohibition against making graven images, representations of objects soon disappeared in the tradition of post-painterly abstraction of which Landfield was simultaneously prodigy and unrecognized primogenitor. Yet as his practice evolved, Landfield’s abstractions became more earthbound and landscape oriented. In his works of the last four decades, color gathers in stratified shapes that resemble mountains and sea only to dissolve into gravity-defying spills and showers of light.

Like Mark Rothko, Landfield swathes color in bands and horizontal layers that transfer an extraordinary affective energy to the viewer. Yet unlike Rothko, whose melancholic intensity achieved its awe-inspiring nadir in the nearly black paintings he created for his chapel in Houston, Landfield’s vision is buoyant. Charting the temporal and tonal passages between night and morning in their fluid collisions of darkness and light, Landfield’s paintings suggest an effervescence nearly unbound by humanity’s march towards destruction. Grounded to this world through horizontal bands of opaque color that typically border their bottom edge, his abstracted landscapes chart “The Forward Path” towards spiritual renewal in an ever more apocalyptic world.

In two nearly identically sized vertical paintings joined together on a Prussian blue wall, the continuity between their wrung-out pale “skies,” golden “mountains,” and placid “lakes” contrast with the differently colored bands that define them. In Call To The Wind (2024), a crimson lip clots the magenta stain that hovers above into a bruise that corporealizes the foreground of this otherwise geological vista. In Range To The Light (2023), a deep purple pleura exhales into an upward-thrusting cobalt wave that melts into the viridian knoll above it. I preferred the bluer one, whose sensitive thrumming of darkness veers from the threat of silhouetted anger on its left edge to the false security of manufactured peace in its pristine blue center.

Born and raised in New York City, Landfield relocated to the lower Hudson Valley after Hurricane Sandy destroyed his studio and loft in Tribeca. If not familiar with his earlier work, one might assume that this late-in-life move from the city inspired his turn towards panoramic views. That assumption is dispelled by the inclusion of a few earlier canvases that demonstrate how the ephemeral landscape within the artist gradually became externalized into more terrestrial shapes and forms.

In the oldest and most astonishing of these precursors, On the Edge (1985), Landfield’s palette shifts between hot and cool across the painting’s two vertically divided halves. The smoldering oranges and magentas suggest the fire raging within, while the cerulean dissolve conjures the empyrean into which all earthly passions disperse. Framed not by a single monochrome perimeter, but by half of a dozen, variously hued borders on three of its sides, On the Edge is also lanced by a series of tape-made “ghost bands” that peel additional pigment from its more pallid hemisphere. Straddling the edge between the mundane and the metaphysical, Landfield’s complex edgework situates his mystical inquiries in the histories of modern art and human rationality. As its hard-edge geometric borders yield to billowing bliss, the painting tunnels through mankind’s obsessive need to frame and reframe our terror-inducing encounter with the unknown into a sensual encounter with being-in-time.