The Brooklyn Rail

I arrive knowing nothing about Sylvia.

It is early in November, and I have a bad cold that I can’t seem to shake as I head uptown to get a jump on something to write about this month. I take the train to 59th Street and walk up Fifth Avenue to an apartment building on East 73rd. I am buzzed into the foyer where I push open a door to my right and stumble into a small room, the first of three in what might have been at one time a railroad flat or a doctor’s office but is now the Craig Starr Gallery. 

Inside I find a friend of mine, another writer, who smiles and hugs me, as surprised to see me as I am to see him. I have never before seen the work of this artist—Sylvia Plimack Mangold—I confess, but my friend has and he happily shares his intel with me. 

“All paint,” he says, waving his hand in a circle around the room. 

I have no idea what he is talking about. I look around and see nothing but blank sheets of paper stuck into frames, and while I am curious about what might be at play here, my friend interrupts that thought to point to strips of masking tape affixing a sheet of paper to a plywood board. He tells me to look closely, that it is not tape, it’s paint. And so is the board.

Even when I lean in, it is hard for me to believe that the thick band of beige is anything but ordinary masking tape. But then, as I step to the side of the work and scan its surface, I see that the orangey grain of the wood is raised, that it is a delicately painted layer of acrylic sitting on top of what is actually a very dense sheet of paper. It happens in a fraction of a second, this sudden understanding that what I think are assemblages of ordinary objects have in fact been carefully crafted by someone. The thing in front of me magically shifts into something else, something someone made, intending it to be seen. Someone who must have been thinking about tape and boards and the infinite possibilities of a blank sheet of paper so much that she sought to pay reverence to them in her practice.

It’s as if Sylvia has stepped into the room. 

And I am hooked.

Sylvia Plimack Mangold, I will later learn online, grew up in Queens (as I did). As a child, she took the subway into Manhattan to attend art lessons at the Museum of Modern Art. She went to Music and Art for high school before studying at the Cooper Union and earning a BFA at Yale. In the early 1960s, she and her husband, the painter Robert Mangold, lived on East 72nd Street, around the corner from where I now stand looking at her work. 

When her first child was born, she was unable to spend her evenings in the loft on the Bowery where the couple had their studios, so she worked at home instead. While her baby napped, she painted tiles, corners of rooms, and mirrors, her apartment becoming both her subject matter and studio, providing a situation within which she could create pictures that troubled perception and representation. In the early 1970s, before turning to depictions of the tools of her trade—paper, rulers, tape—Sylvia began dropping items from the family’s laundry onto the floor—the laundry paintings: Is this why I call her Sylvia? Because I presume that, having also known the exhaustion and joy of caring for children, the isolation of those years when they were small, there should also exist some form of kinship between us? 

The later tools are what my friend and I are now seeing as we move from painting to painting, chatting and free-associating with each other, enjoying the way our vision deconstructs and reconstructs what Sylvia has made. Rulers affixed to the sides of an empty canvas, a hand-written note on lined paper so clearly pulled from a spiral notebook—everything is an illusion, a careful simulation of the tools of the artist’s trade painted into compositions that reflect the making of the work itself.

I assume that this will go on, that we will loop through the exhibition enjoying these whimsical and brilliant explorations of perception, of what is real and why that matters. That to reward our fidelity to looking closely, the presence of the artist will be found within the work again and again in a happy game of hide-and-go-seek, and that then we will be on our way.

But Sylvia is not done.

We turn into the last room of the gallery and grow quiet. A September Passage, a large painting made in 1984, fills the wall in front of us. 

“A masterpiece,” my friend murmurs after a beat. 

I say nothing. 

Instead, I try to make sense of the suddenness of color—chartreuse, canary, and cerulean—that unexpectedly follows the gray and beige work-a-day palette of the previous room as Sylvia shifts to landscape, painting a grassy lawn that stretches out to a coppice of golden trees. A low ridge rises behind them. Puffs of clouds, white, silver, yellow, and gray, drift through a perfect sky. I take it in for a moment, then inch closer. 

My friend is already pacing, squatting, turning his head to make sense of the thing. He points along the four edges of the frame. “The tape,” he says, turning to look at me. There it is again, the beige stripe of paint that mimics masking tape running along the perimeter of the work, here so cleverly rendered that it looks as if parts of it have torn away over time. Once noticed, it reduces the grass, the trees, the sky, everything back into paint on a canvas, as the picture I took for a window turns into something Sylvia is working on in her studio. 

Which is no longer on the Bowery or East 72nd Street, but on an old farm in upstate New York, where she moved with her husband and children in 1971. 

Where she paints A September Passage, again applying a thick but meticulous coating of paint onto the picture plane in the likeness of masking tape. Only the most fully realized part of the painting rests within its borders as she crops her image and guides us once more to what she wants us to see. Look in here, she seems to suggest to us, and yet she doesn’t hide what has gone on beyond this beige frontier, where brushstrokes fizzle out before making it to the edge of the canvas. A sketchy line indicates a hill, a drift of cloud that does not make it across the tape and into the composition. In places, Sylvia’s brush swipes over the tape, bleeding the color of the sky or grass into it. Because she isn’t looking to please. 

She is just looking. 

Making work that will eventually lead to a series of images of two trees, a pin oak and a maple, that she will paint repeatedly; branches seen from her studio window once she goes back inside; a durational performance of filling her frame with what appears in her window accomplished over many seasons and years, a private meditation which will garner tremendous attention. 

A September Passage comes in a time that heralds the tree paintings.

A September Passage, painted in Sylvia’s forty-sixth year, is a becoming. 

Sylvia was born in September. 

My friend once pointed out to me that looking at a painting is a way of traveling back in time, because you are standing in the same spot where the artist stood, your eye reliving the movement of their brush. I think about this as I place myself in Sylvia’s footsteps and follow the memory of her movement. Whatever it is that Sylvia is looking at, I am seeing it too, but it keeps shifting. Is she looking across the grass at the trees? Or is she looking at her canvas? Both of course, but what is different here is the way she breaks the spell of the image over and over again, inviting me to awaken and join her.

My friend points out the mark of a large brush, dipped into the blue of her sky and swept across half of the painting, lowering the horizon as whatever trees and bushes may have been painted in disappear under its force. In turn, I hold the camera lens of my phone over the very center of her trees and we marvel at the pure abstraction that lies within the tiny screen, the black lines that indicate trunks and branches, and the swipes of lemon and lime color that become autumnal leaves as we take a step back, continuing our improvisational response to Sylvia’s tacit image.

“Constable,” we say of her clouds.

“Bruegel,” of the suggestion of distant undergrowth—or perhaps ruins—that runs as a shadow beyond her trees.

Realism, abstraction. Objectness. Unselfconscious. Luscious.

We say all the words we can think of until we run out of things to say, until there is only looking. 

Until there is only A September Passage. 

Until even that closes up and grows quiet.

My friend tells me he needs to push on, he has more galleries he wants to hit before the day is over. We leave together, saying our goodbyes on the steps outside. He is heading east, but I decide to walk west across the park where the trees are just beginning to turn.