The Brooklyn Rail

Richard Pousette-Dart’s Geometry of Summer marks a significant moment in the artist’s life and work. The seventeen works represented in the show span across the artist’s last twenty years of his practice, and together provide evidence of the virtuosity of his mature style and the techniques that he developed to exceed the limits of the grid. Important themes emerge from this survey in addition to his use and expansion of the grid, including his translation of the pointillist gesture into Abstract Expressionist contexts. But a deeper revelation of the exhibition is Pousette-Dart’s ability to navigate the irresolvable space between paintings and images: the inaccessible realms within perception and reality that the process and material of painting expresses.

Through formal strategies, Pousette-Dart spent his last years bringing the pointillist mark and the dabs of paint most closely associated with the Impressionists and Divisionists into the register of modern art of the mid-century. In comparison to his earlier work, which preferred more graphic line and shape, the artist’s late work relied on heavy patches of paint that he repeated across the surface of the painting. The artist used these thick, textured mounds of paint to subdue and neutralize the color, but it also systematized the color relationships into a repeatable grid. In each of the paintings shown, Pousette-Dart begins with a symmetrical grid before softening its rigid confines through his update on the Divinionist approach. Sometimes the grid excavates sigils and symbols that elicit the experience of Aboriginal markings and weavings, as the artist explores what mystic and talismanic meaning can be derived from a rigid and adherent approach—as is the case in Golden Door (1989–90) and Yellow Trellis (1985). At other turns, the grids reveal forms that are closer to diagrams: the universal equations that uphold perceptible reality, as can be seen in paintings like Geometry of Summer (1992).

The other condition is the frame. Pousette-Dart’s use of the frame and the edge of form reveals the formative and critical doubt within his work, which is that we cannot discern whether these are meant to be interpreted as images or as paintings—as optical effects, or as painterly systems. His vision creates more of a dialectic tension than Jackson Pollock and the all-over field, but is more extravagant than the subtle relationships explored by Mark Rothko. We see the illusion of image purposefully broken in The Burning Square (1979–80), which feels like the most liberating painting in the exhibition. Pousette-Dart left the bottom of the canvas as loose, gestural lashes of paint that indicate the early steps of the process, revealing that these are not just optical sensations, but process-based abstractions. Whether we are looking at painterly effects that are intended to be read as optical illusions, or whether these still remain squarely within the realm of modernist method and process is left open and indiscernible.

The paintings elicit the experience of afterimages and phosphenes—the indirect experience of images and colors that we see when closing our eyes. Yet, the painterliness inhibits them from being understood directly as these experiences. The soft rings of shadow build the effect of light—of optical drift and dropout. In Light on the Water of Venice (1975–76), the black frame that is shaped around the subtle and shifting forms makes for an experience of looking at a screen, which Pousette-Dart uses to develop a strong sense of optical vibration. By looking into one area, the immediate surroundings become impossible to see. It gives the viewer a wandering eye that keeps what is seeable limited and oblique. In addition, the scale is indeterminate, adding to the viewer’s uncertainty and disorientation. At times they gesture towards macrocosmic events, evoking a monumental language of voids and apeira; the curve of horizon lines fold back and away from us at deep distance. But then, in other moments, they seem to close in, revealing an affinity for subtle expressions of cellular movements—of waning and distant light.

Geometry of Summer depicts an artist in later life, in full command of their ability, investigating the deeper questions of what connects us. By investigating simple forms and the eidetic images of culture, Pousette-Dart was considering the manifold realities of the universe, of spiritual thought, and the deep registers of human time that could be expressed within the direct action of painting. The symbol is a metaphor for our extreme limits and vestige of knowing—of our ability to attach shared meaning to recognized form. Pousette-Dart builds the primary shapes and symbols up through rigid forms just to undo them with soft vibration and the heavy material of paint. The reduction of shape and the almost stereogram-like effects that the soft clouds of color achieve reach for a noumenal world of symbols and experiences outside of the phenomenal and human experience of them.