Robert Mangold
"Robert Mangold" by Patrick Howlett, Summer 2010, pp. 100-101
Robert Mangold has spent much of his career exploring variations of a formal theme: the interplay of line, frame and colour. This Albright-Knox show features four recent series of paintings and a group of studies for a public work, with emphasis on the two most recent painting series, Column Structures and Ring Images.
My first impression was that these works seemed to be embracing a decorative mode of reduction, especially the earlier Columns and Curled Figures series. In the stately Albright-Knox, the statement they make is elegant but conventional. Compositionally, they are not as exciting as Brice Marden’s snaking lines, which they certainly relate to, or as funky as some of Mangold’s own work from the 1980s. However, the longer I looked at the work, the Column Structures and Ring Images in particular, the more I sensed the reserved narrative that emerges from the line’s inevitable trajectory within the containment of the painting.
The Column Structures paintings in this exhibition are made of multiple panels: tall, rectangular shapes joined by sections pushing out horizontally to create a “T,” “t” or otherwise branch-like form generally extending out from the upper parts of the canvas. Each panel has its own drawn grid pattern, divided into halves, quarters or diagonals; each work also contains two meandering graphite lines (one solid and one doubled) that pass through the column in distinct configurations, always hitting points or edges on the grids.
Sitting on a bench, I speculate whether it is the shape of the canvas that generates the movement of the lines, creating a structure they can fill, or if the choreographed lines shape the frame, the canvas acting as a container made especially for their form. I also muse how a given line could have gone different ways, aligned at different points, bounced off different edges. But of course what is in front of me is the only way it will ever be, and the idiosyncratic colouring of each work heightens this feeling of autonomy. This poetics of container and contained models a freedom with limits that suggests a human analogy. Bodies are also containers that life fi lls: with that in mind, the paintings strike me as individuals, each having a distinct narrative informed by subjective choices. As the lines idiosyncratically traverse the canvas, they are gracefully embodied by their support.
The Ring Images paintings work similarly, albeit with significant differences. In these works the canvas is doughnut-shaped, with two panels making up the shape of the ring. A single line finds its trajectory around each work, hitting various grid points and edges, and sometimes finding itself again to create a continuous loop, but not always. Even when the line is not continuous, it is always circulating strongly, creating an engine of movement that we feel compelled to imaginatively continue by joining the lines in our minds. Herein lies the openness of Mangold’s work and its primary impact on the viewer. The formal decisions reverberate mentally as we trace their trajectories, a purring motor of a formal existentialism.
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