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Tetuan I belongs to a series of twelve paintings from the artist’s period in Morocco, all executed between 1964 and 1965. This series marks an important moment in the artist’s career as the brilliance and vividness of color in these works were not previously seen in the darker palette of Stella’s earlier paintings. The majority of these twelve Moroccan paintings are today held in some of the most prominent collections around the world:
Agadir I - Private Collection
Agadir II - Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Armand P. Bartos, New York City
Fez I - Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Fez II - MoMA Collection, New York City
Rabat - Collection of the City of Frankfurt, Germany
Meknes - Collection of U.S. State Department, Art in Embassies Program
Tetuan II - Collection of the Philip Johnson Glass House
Tetuan III - Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, LA
Sidi Ifni I - Collection of Estee Lauder Cosmetics, New York
Sidi Ifni II - Private Collection, New York
Marrakech - Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art Collection, New York City
Tetuan I - Private Collection, Switzerland
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“Stella’s use of eye-popping colors and commonly available house paint in once-fashionable designer hues formed another bridge between contemporary movements, in this case between the industrial aesthetic of Minimalism and the new color vibrancy of Pop Art… While Warhol’s own colors often range from dazzling to melancholic, Stella’s approach is more like that of a mad color scientist, but with an academic pedigree.”
Michael Auping in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Frank Stella: A Retrospective, p. 24
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Frank Stella, New York, 1959
© Hollis Frampton
Frank Stella is one of the leading figures of the Minimalist movement of the 1960s, concentrating his paintings on the relationship between form and color. Minimalist art presents simple, orderly, harmonious, rather purified shapes, reducing its artistic propositions to colour, shape, line and texture. Tetuan I is an archetype of this development of minimalist modern paintings.
In Tetuan I, the yellow and burgundy diagonals are a reflection of the exotic geometric formations and vibrant hues of Arabic tiles. Each of the bright colored paintings from the Moroccan series is further underlined by their geographical titles, which all reference cities in Morocco. Through a closer look, the artist’s brilliant technique is revealed and the small separation between the thinly defined, yellow and burgundy diagonals of fluorescent alkyd pigment come to light. Stella’s use of fluorescent, Day-Glo acrylic paints brings a certain vibrance to his paintings, adding an optical dynamism and illusion of depth to the simplistic geometry of his paintings. Stella’s return to a traditional, square format in his Moroccan paintings underlines the artist’s pioneering investigation of color, placing the focus for the viewer solely upon the potent optical effects of the color combination. Using only a single layer of paint in this series, setting the focal point on the use of fluorescent paint, the artist plays with materiality and physicality, challenging the two-dimensionality of the painting.
Testifying to the significance and rarity of these paintings within the artist’s oeuvre, the majority of the Moroccan paintings are held in such prominent collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, amongst other prestigious international institutions.
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According to the amount of paint, the vigour of the gesture and the type of support, the markings on the canvas vary, combining uniformity and difference, repetition, and spontaneity. Toroni works on dinstict surfaces such as canvas, newspaper, cloth, gallery walls, and floors. The minimalist artist puts the emphasis on the materiality of the artwork. uniformity and difference, repetition, and spontaneity. In Empreintes de pinceau n°50 répétées à intervalles réguliers de 30 cm, the artist painted red square-rectangle on a white canvas, keeping a constant in his serial and repetitive dynamic. The structure of his work consists of a set of pencil crosses, the location of which is determined with the aid of a compass every 30 cm, so that each imprint is placed at an equal distance from its neighbours.
Through his practice initiated in 1960s, Toroni explores the notions of authorship and questions the figure of the artist in his paintings. In 1967, Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and Toroni founded the art collective BMPT. The collective through their artworks called into question notions of authorship and the precedence of the art object over the authorship, leading them to replace subjectivity and expressiveness with neutral, repetitive patterns.
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“I do not visualize ideas: I apply a paintbrush, the imprints of the paintbrush become visible, and this may be generative of new ideas.”
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Considering himself as a painter, not an artist, Niele Toroni, born in Switzerland in 1937, is known today as one of the first European minimalist painters of the 1960s. Niele Toroni developed a practice called Travail-Peinture which consisted of marking a surface with imprints of a umber. 50 paintbrush at regular 30 cm intervals.
Toroni’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Kunstmuseum Luzern and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich.
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Psychic Governance, while still being domestic in size, is impressive in scale. Its aligned recurring black scrawls create a dynamic story line, like a text on a green background. On the foreground of the painting, yellow, burgundy and blue scribbles superimposing the black motifs provide a second dimension to the narrative. Through games of antagonism, present in the title Psychic Governance, Jonathan Lasker invents paintings of opposites. His stroke is pictorial, in its thickness, its layers of paint, while his surfaces are entirely filled with a form of writing marked by a certain automaticity. From the mid 1980s, Lasker’s compositions were increasingly animated and his palette was at its most vibrant. His paintings from this period are unsurprisingly much sought after and therefore rare to come on the market The titles of Jonathan Lasker’s paintings as well as the paintings in themselves, invite the viewer to want to solve the enigma, to look at the forms to better understand what they conceal. Psychic Governance’s intriguing title added to its compelling composition makes this painting a piece de resistance and the perfect example of Lasker’s artist’s practice origins.
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“My goal is to bring the viewer to the threshold of narrativity without crossing over, to bring the viewer to the state of pure pictorially.”
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Lasker in his New York studio in 2007.
© Intermuseum Conservation Association
Jonathan Lasker incorporates biomorphic shapes, geometric patterns, and graffiti marks within a shared pictorial space. His choice of bold color, his gestural forms and his recurrent use of grid are all part of his distinctive artistic vocabulary. Lasker plays with the visual means of his paintings combining paste-like thick applications of paint with simple line drawings. In his work, opposing elements such as matte and smooth paint, ordered and scribbled forms coexist within the canvas. While his paintings are abstract, the various elements such as the scribbles, the grid and the repetition create a narrative in his paintings. Lasker has generated an alphabet of signs, almost like an unknown script that play with each other in terms of opposition and superimposition. As such Lasker develops a new approach to abstract painting.
