Ellsworth Kelly at Matthew Marks

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Ellsworth Kelly has been exhibiting for longer than most of us have been alive, so it seems pointless to cavil about the work. If I sound less than enthusiastic, that’s both true and not true.

I am not a fan of his paintings. They leave me completely unmoved. But his works on paper, over half a century old, still jump off the wall.

Ellsworth Kelly installation at Matthew Marks Gallery, up through April 11

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Let’s start with the paintings. In the large gallery at 522 W. 22nd Street, eight works from 2007 and 2008—each a colored rectangle of stretched canvas placed diagonally atop a more square rectangle of white canvas—are meant to challenge your perception of shape and space. While I always like seeing color and shape, I have to admit that I'm not particularly challenged by this work. But their installation in this gallery provides an experience. The illumination from the skylights creates luminous parallelograms that float like visual echoes above the pigmented shapes, which hover slightly away from the wall. But you have to stand at a remove--as I did to shoot the photographs--to take in the mise-en-scene. Once you break through the fourth wall, so to speak, the drama is gone.
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Now let me do a 180 and say that I love the works on paper, on view in the small space next door at #525. Created between 1954 and 1962, these small framed works in gouache (or oil, ink and/or graphite) feature shapes, abstracted from natural forms, as well as some purely geometric compositions. They are intimate, inquisitive, fresh, still resonating with energy.

You can see some excellent installation shots on the gallery website, but let me show you a few up close:
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In the gouache-on newsprint drawing above, I can't help but think of Jasper Johns's encaustic on newsprint Green Target. Johns and Kelly are contemporaries; I think they might even have been living on Coenties Slip downtown at the same time, so the visual connection might have been borne of geographic proximity

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You're seeing some reflection in the glass from across the gallery--visible in the other pictures as well, even though I shot each individual work at an angle

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Each of these works is about 14 x 16 inches. Look closely at the one above and you'll see that the same yellow rectangle which appears as a painting in the top photograph also appears here. Can you make it out? Here it's on a same-yellow ground, and of course it's much smaller, but it's interesting to see how Kelly's layered shapes have recurred

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I love these variations on a theme

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And there's that yellow rectangle again, below:

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