Frank Stella – Star among the stars

Practical information:
Galerie Ceysson & Bénétière at Domaine de Panéry
From July 5 to September 28
Free admission
Opening on Saturday July 5 and Sunday July 6

May 4, 2024. “Frank Stella is dead”.

It’s 11:30 pm and I receive this text message from a painter friend.

I look at the page in the New York Times announcing the death of the man usually referred to as the precursor of minimalism. The great American daily headlines “master of reinvention”. I was shocked, as I was writing this text, begun a few days earlier, about this summer’s exhibition of the artist’s last works at the Domaine de Panéry. I realize that the exhibition has become a tribute. And this text, straddling the before and after, a kind of passage.

I’m looking for images of his Black Paintings, which disrupted the history of art. In particular, this vibrant painting of a grid of black and white lines entitled Die Fahne Hoch! in reference to a chilling Nazi party chant. Abstraction, yes, but with a vertiginous meaning that doesn’t need to be figuration. The narrative flows naturally from the form, which is so powerful. It’s a real history painting, but completely abstract. Never before seen. This is Frank Stella’s artistic revolution of the early 1960s.

Thereafter, his approach never ceased to challenge the possibilities of extending the original flatness of the canvas. For the artist, a painting was not an image, it was a “working space”: the place of all possible transformations and research, the place of fulfillment of thought, of the symbolic construction of a vision of the world; dare we evoke here, a few centuries apart, Leonardo da Vinci’s cosa mentale. Stella’s pictorial research extended the essentiality of form as far as possible, starting from an original point: Josef Albers’ square, Jean Hélion’s cone, Matisse’s paper cut-outs, Velasquez’s illusionism, Tintoretto’s projected perspective… Of course, to list all these revolutionary elders could be a bit of an inventory à la Prévert.

In Stella’s case, however, this enumeration is far from a cliché. For his artistic vision has never ceased to question the meaning of modernism and the avant-garde in painting, but also the power of formalism. “Formalism” is, moreover, a controversial word, so much so that 20th-century art history has tried to combat it in favor of the conceptual, the idea, or even the documentary and sociological, more recently. Nevertheless, the question of formal power remains the great subject of Stella, who like Richard Serra in the field of sculpture (who died a month before him), succeeded in evolving the notion of flatness towards absolutely innovative three-dimensional territories. The almost concomitant demise of these two sacred monsters seems to signal the end of an era.

Stella’s greatest achievement was his daring handling of form, which he is probably the only person to have succeeded in pulling the threads of his minimalist lines and grids into what he calls, in fine, “maximalism”. In much the same way as Italian primitivism gave rise, two centuries later, to Baroque extravagance. Some have seen this as a change in style. But it’s not. It’s absolute continuity in terms of perpetual “reinvention”.

The recent works in the exhibition are a masterly demonstration of this. The first is a work on paper from the series Illustrations after El Lissitzky’s “Had Gadya”, dated 1985. It could almost be called a manifesto, as it openly refers to the Russian avant-garde artist El Lissitzky, paying direct homage to his mastery of geometric sobriety while setting it in motion in an animation of colored superimposition evoking the rhythm of the traditional Passover song, “Had Gadya”. Here, he introduces the wave motif, which he would take up again in his famous series inspired by Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, in which he brilliantly blends different etching techniques with collage and hand-colored highlights. These aggregations of forms seem a baroque-abstract response to Paul Cézanne’s revolutionary figurative cubism. This response is brought to a climax in the immense painting Karpathenburg II from 1996, an impressive pictorial symphony in which geometric forms emancipate themselves from the painting, which seems to be, in itself, a synthesis of all previous avant-gardes, be they cubism, abstract expressionism, geometric abstraction, lyricism etc… Then, from the 2000s onwards, his painting evolved into fascinatingly complex reliefs, combining steel, fiberglass, aluminum and thermoformed plastic (RPT). Their multicolored swirls tangle, almost flying away. Inner membranes of a car engine or a living organism? We turn around. Painting trophies. Music trophies for the series inspired by Scarlatti’s Sonata. Fishing trophies too. Some of the titles evoke the rivers and lakes of the Gaspésie region of Quebec, where the artist liked to spend time. Painting, here transformed into sculpture, is an imaginary territory that synthesizes the world, whether infinitely large or infinitely small, with its multiple variations. For the artist, painting is fundamentally a question of space, which can be expanded to infinity. The star motif is also increasingly present in these works. The idea of an expanding universe? Particularly in the monumental teak star sculpture. Stella, let’s not forget, means star. Minimalist, constructivist, baroque, expressionist, illusionist, maximalist… Stella, with no artistic boundaries other than his fidelity to painting. He was an absolute futurist, and today he has joined the stars. 

         Julie Chaizemartin 

 May 4, 2024 (the day the artist died, aged 87)