STANLEY WHITNEY – YELLOW, NOON AND NIGHT
2012-11-26The title of the exhibition, which is also the title of one of Whitney’s paintings, is, like most of his paintings, inspired by music, poetry and his love of reading: In this case by a blues song called Morning, Noon and Night. For the title Stanley Whitney simply replaced the word “Morning” with “Yellow” to introduce the aspect of colour. And the title also emphasises rhythm as a parameter that is essential to Whitney’s work: Whereas rhythm is central to Jazz and Blues, it is the colour that makes the beat in Whitney’s paintings.
Colour is what structures the paintings. For a long time Whitney has been working with square canvasses of different sizes, which he structures with up to four unequal bands consisting of one or more lines the width of a paintbrush. Starting from the top left–almost like writing a text–he fills the bands with a series of non-uniform rectangles and squares of different colour. This process, which ends at the bottom right of the canvas, can be repeated two or three times. The choice of colour is intuitive and the result of the painting process which is unpredictable an unknown.
Whitney works with the system of “call-and-response”, which is a principle used across multiple disciplines, and in music is typical in spirituals, gospels, blues and jazz. He paints one colour and then decides which colour responds to the first one. This very simple principle results in the fact that the same colour is almost never used twice and the colours become more and more complex.
Opposite – This Side of Blue, 2011
Exhibition runs through to January 12th, 2013
Galerie Nordenhake
Lindenstrasse 34
D – 10969
Berlin
