Monday, October 25, 2010

Robert Swain Visual Sensations



Robert Swain, 8x8-5A RO#3©, 8’x8’, 1999-2001
Acrylic on Canvas




October 7 - November 14, 2010
Hunter College Times Square Gallery /MFA Building
450 West 41st Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues)


I first encountered Robert Swain’s work as a graduate student at Hunter College where he teaches. At the time in the mid 90’s when social identity and politics had infiltrated the art world there seemed to be nothing as anachronistic as color field painting. So-called formalist tendencies were the enemy’s repressive shield, to be parried at all cost, to preserve creative freedom. In reality, the situation in the art world is constantly evolving between form, content, relevance and irrelevance. There were/are no definitive bulwarks to defend.


The reductive tendencies in Swain’s body of work maintain a severity of focus obstinate to being moved by the whims of aesthetic taste. His method is akin to the empiricism of an entomologist endlessly cataloguing marginal variations of fruit fly generations. In his case his subject is intervals of color, and its analysis is so minutely controlled that the viewer can, at first encounter, feel an amateur witness to the experiment. This is a quick read, however, which has probably led to the work being sometimes critically received in the past as archly formulaic, a perspective which can constrain the work’s main phenomenal impact, a priori, as it were.


Most of the show contains variations on the geometry of the grid with allusions to dynamic symmetry in some of the variations. What is remarkable though, for such a deliberate approach, is that the overall experience of color in the show seems to float independent of these structures, because of the artist’s exquisite control of minor and major chords of hue, value, and saturation.


What to make of this work in terms of its cultural significance? One could refer to the democratic aspect of the grid, the multitude of variations of color and its allegory of liberal sensibilities, or even an American sense of pragmatism. These would be available as definitions but would probably be more misleading than not. The simple honesty of Swain’s approach can seem so plainly self evident that it has the consistency of air. But hey, who forgets to breathe?

Tom McGlynn
copyright 2010