The Brooklyn Rail

Arborists identify the pin oak (Quercus palustris) by its distinctive branching habit: the lowest branches angle sharply downward, the middle stretch horizontally, and the upper ones ascend. In her 1984 painting, The Pin Oak, Sylvia Plimack Mangold depicts the ascending limbs swirling in an icy curtain of wind as they reach skyward. She reveals how the anatomy of trees is evolutionarily adapted for survival, as trunk and limbs correspondingly twist and bend without breaking. The oak is framed on the canvas by illusionistic masking tape, painted by the artist in her signature trompe l’oeil, a conceptual device that she introduced in the mid-1970s in her meticulously observed paintings of floors, mirrors, and landscapes that surround her studio in Washingtonville, New York. Over her six-decade career, Plimack Mangold has explored the conundrum of perception and representation, crisply summarized by the ten works included in Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Tapes, Fields, and Trees, 1975–84. Last shown together in 1994 during the artist’s retrospective at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the selections include loans from the artist, the Lewitt Collection, and other private collections.

Standing before Taped Over Twenty-Four-Inch Exact Rule on Light Floor (1975), I crane my neck to figure out what is going on with the raked perspective of that linoleum floor. Here, centuries of illusions of floors converge at a vanishing point somewhere between the artist’s kitchen and the Virgin Mary”s courtyard in Carlo Crivelli’s The Annunciation, with St. Emidius (1486). Plimack Mangold’s parchment-colored floor has the timeworn surface of a workaday kitchen or studio, the substrate of ordinary rooms where (mostly) women cooked, made art, and cared for families. Any aspirations toward luxury could be satisfied by floor manufacturers who faked the finishes of rare Italian marbles.

The deceptive simplicity of Four Coats (1976)—an exemplar of the behavior of pigment as, and in, light—rewards gradual looking. The color of damp plaster, a rectangular plane blankets an underpainting of chromium oxide green brushstrokes. The marks fan out from beneath the translucent edges of simulated masking tape strips. Two yardsticks corral the canvas’s vertical edges. But wait! The sticks are simulacra too, their shopworn metallic patina and legacy manufacturer’s names (Westcott, Lufkin) unlock a sound-memory of my grandfather snapping open his folding ruler. It is easy to understand how Plimack Mangold and Robert Ryman have remained mutual admirers of each other’s work for decades; both artists have investigated the expressive capacities inherent within a limited set of painterly elements, particularly the color white.

In Paint the Tape, Paint the Paper, Paint the Tape (1975), I hear the clicking purr of paper being ripped from the stenographer’s notebook, containing the artist’s to-do list. Plimack Mangold’s list painting cleverly reworks the genre of autobiographical letter-rack paintings, from seventeenth-century Dutch painters, to the nineteenth-century American trompe l’oeil master William Michael Harnett. The tradition of trompe l’oeil has always had a popular and political underpinning. In Philadelphia, Charles Willson Peale’s Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale I) (1795), gave viewers pause about accepting what they saw at first glance as the truth. As art historian Wendy Bellion has observed, illusionistic art may have reminded citizens to be skeptical about their government’s activities, not just its public pronouncements.

Composed in harmonies of white and gray, Untitled ( 1977) articulates the bone structure of a Northeastern winter landscape near the Shawangunk Mountains. Plimack Mangold lays down rolling foothills and fences as she freezes miles of receding space in the off-kilter geometries of her window. Windowpanes that harken back to that white linoleum floor compress individual views into a grid of sixteen closeups. Seeing is attending to motion over time—move an inch, exhale, be distracted, and everything changes. Think of Lois Dodd’s manipulation of windows and mirrors, a metaphor for journeying even as we sit still, or Lucas Samaras’s 1966 Mirrored Room.

A cinematic tour de force, A September Passage (1984), captivates a group of beholders in the gallery, communing in awe for many minutes. A copse of trees in the middle distance is thick with the sulfur and green-golds of senescing foliage in early fall. Sylvia Plimack Mangold transmits the felt experience of landscape in weather, over time. Now we are outdoors, no longer separated by a window or anchored to a floor. The ersatz masking tape border still pins us down in the material world, but our boundaries are loosened, we are in a position to adjust our focus, and for just a moment, to be free.