Space.   Gravity.   Sound.   Sight.

To draw the fields that allow form to be perceived in a work of art compels imagining them first. Not to imagine: form. But, to imagine what form may require: imagining space; imagining gravity; imagining sound; imagining sight.

Untitled offers a record of di Suvero’s action that imagines space first. A black sumi spider erupts on the paper plane as an immediate history of gesture and memory of movement. Di Suvero comprehends original space on paper and forces it to superficially leave that primordial realm by engaging it. Original space in Untitled, though changed now by form, retains its primary nature through di Suvero’s mastered understanding of its unity with form.

Born of space and motion, form becomes the locale in which di Suvero maps his next monument, in firm lines of white. Like a delicate after-armature, this pallid map echoes a sumi memory of action that began in pure space.

In Untitled, it is as if the history of movement itself would become the suspension bridge of a forged di Suvero honoring imaginary fields.

Within a set of specified components resides the source of all colors and the first element of drawing.

A specified instruction results in a single type of action.

But what is the impulse to make the drawing?

From prescribed settings such as these, the impulse may lie in a desire to see the outcome, to draw from the basis of an idea in order to realize the idea.

But like some deceptively simple notion of chaos, in which a defined set of circumstances evolves to a variable end simply by occurring, Sol LeWitt’s circumstantial drawings begin as prescribed, yet they occur according to the hand that draws them. Is the impulse to draw simply mechanical? Or is the impulse rather to reveal the hand and the variable end?

Uniquely, in LeWitt’s primary gouaches another important element arises: he withholds his own long-established directive that the execution of his work be carried out by others, and he reserves the gouaches for himself alone to create. Given this extra condition, the prescription becomes exclusively confined to the artist’s hand, and there evolves an entirely new circumstance.

Within specified components and specified instructions a drawing occurs.

But by way of one extra condition, the impulse to draw flaps its butterfly wings, and the outcome vibrates with the imprint of only the artist’s hand.

Maybe it was just desire.

Dark Ribbon Drawing triggers in me a desire to taste blackness. Even now I cannot come up with a word to adequately describe either this hankering to taste it or the specific quality of blackness that Lynch achieves with this pastel medium. The equation of deepness and darkness in contrast to light does not adequately describe the juxtaposition here. Neither does yin/yang. Nor positive/negative. However the black and white do emerge out of one another in a sort of impossible way, as do the planes that describe the white as “not” a ribbon. I love this play between object/non-object that challenges the viewer as they read the title. Lynch creates tactile and conceptual opposites while simultaneously defying them. They emerge from a world that is not ours but that is fully occupied by the medium—black pastel pigment.