The apparent oddities in Rothko’s juxtaposition of esthetic forms, sucking out of colour and perspective, the reduction ad absurdam to two dimensions, is as if he tries to preclude the possibility of reinterpreation of what is already deliberately an avoidance of “message”, “context” or “reference”.
The absolute removal of comfort in any internal dialogue, is the silence of monotonal and epic space. The viewer is disallowed the simple defense of remaining outside the image.
Painting becomes one darkly tolling bell of message and medium coming together at a point, way outside the usual points of visual reference.
Form, content and meaning become indivisible in a resonant totality requiring the participant to exchange the usual looking at for the far greater comittment required of looking in.
Multi-variants of the same blocks of browns and greys express eloquent nothingness. Training the eye to places where the smallest imperceptible shifts in the focal point denote layers of meaning which transcend the mundane. All the while avoiding allowing the viewer to displace these virtually physical discomforts with any solace of notions of the spiritual. Rothko's monotony goes beyond either of these polarities.
A skyline becomes a back wall becomes a doorway becomes an event horizon.
Each perceptual shift, amplifying, complimenting, subverting any possible sense of ease with where we might be allowed to bring our awareness to rest.
Every atonal approach in pastel, brown and grey, charting the line, providing a narrative with imperceptible shifts of emphasis, intimations of fear, places of distance intimated through ineffably veiled layers of colour.
Utterly the thing itself, unsigned, unannealed, promising nothing but that your gaze and possibly your sense of identity might be drawn down into the event horizon of what is essentially mere description, yet somehow manages both to represent and yet be more than merely approximation.
A distillation of vulnerability, as if saying: “So, if beyond this, then what?”
Huge swathes of black, nothingness delineated by the lightest touch of form.
Capturing the paradox of darkness illuminated by the yet darker still. Capturing the moments between seeing and not seeing.
Darker and darker tones providing an unbearable tension between the uproar of existence and a quietus of elsewhere.
Uncoloured, unformed points in space, past levity and twitch, huge pre-ironic salutes to nihilism, avoiding edge, boundary or limit. Bounded here and there by the prosaic application of badly applied masking tape arbitrarily overpainted.
As if in some crystaline and despairing objection to any notion of the finite, meeting the final restrictions of temporal existence in a frenzy of mute fury.
And in the face of this profundity, in the final analysis confronted by the paradox that these universes will ultimately be bounded by the edge of his canvas eternities ending where the magnolia gallery wall begins again.
It is within just such a paradox lies Rothko's infuriatingly exciting visual abstractions.
At times the visceral tension created between background and foreground, metaphor and making so acute, that Gestaltists would have trouble distinguishing thither and yon.
Somehow these frozen moments cannot rise above the tittle tattle, the peering prurient randyness for fact, figure, date, technique, form and all of the thousand other mundane trivialities we use to fool ourselves that somehow we exercise control by choosing how to view - and what we have received and perceived within that process of viewing.
Frames, into the corner of which will constantly edge the live and kicking.
Ambling past these monumental artefacts, we can offer delirium, tedium, a cure for OCD or a genuinely interactive Alpha wave meditative environment, at any point and occasionally all at once.
Or merely, a milky and indifferent smile from the sleepy depths of a pushchair, driven by pairs of idling, chattering humans.
The Moments of Happiness.
We had the experience but missed the meaning.
And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.
Beyond any meaning we can assign to happiness, the past experience not of one life only, but of many generations.
Not forgetting something that is probably quite, ineffable. After TS Eliot
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