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Ad Rheinhardt
David Zwirner, New York
November 7 – December 18, 2013

The easiest mistake to make with Ad Reinhardt's black paintings is to think you have already seen them. A quick glance registers a series of nearly identical black squares, each five feet by five feet, hanging with austere regularity. From a distance they can appear almost stubbornly mute, as though Reinhardt had reduced painting to a conceptual exercise in negation. Yet David Zwirner's centennial exhibition, organized by Robert Storr, demonstrates that these works are not empty propositions but demanding perceptual events. They ask almost nothing of the viewer except time—a request that has become increasingly uncommon in an age that prizes immediate visual gratification.

The installation is remarkable for what it refuses. There are no dramatic sightlines, no theatrical staging, and no curatorial devices designed to rescue the paintings from their apparent sameness. Instead, the gallery trusts the peculiar temporal logic of Reinhardt's work. Stand before one canvas for thirty seconds and it remains black. Stay for several minutes and subtle cruciform geometries begin to emerge. Gradually, distinctions between blue-black, red-black, and green-black surfaces become perceptible. The painting has not changed; your vision has.

That transformation is Reinhardt's true medium. Rather than depicting the world, these paintings recalibrate the act of looking itself. We tend to think of vision as instantaneous, but Reinhardt insists that seeing unfolds through duration. The eye must adjust, hesitate, and even surrender its confidence before the image reveals itself. His paintings reward patience not with narrative or symbolism, but with an acute awareness of perception as a living process.

Much has been made of Reinhardt's famous declarations that his paintings contained "no texture, no brushwork, no drawing, no forms, no design, no color." Such statements have often been interpreted as the uncompromising rhetoric of a modernist purist determined to eliminate every trace of illusion or expression. Yet the experience of these paintings suggests something considerably richer. Their matte surfaces absorb light rather than reflect it, producing an extraordinary sense of optical depth. Every attempt to suppress expression paradoxically intensifies the viewer's emotional encounter. What appears at first to be austere gradually becomes deeply sensuous.

The exhibition also reminds us that Reinhardt's pursuit of reduction was never merely formal. During the final decades of his life he developed a sustained interest in Eastern philosophy and meditation, reading widely in Buddhist thought and regarding prolonged contemplation as an essential discipline of perception. While he consistently rejected mystical interpretations of his work, it is difficult to stand before these paintings without recognizing their affinity with meditative practice. They require stillness, sustained attention, and the gradual quieting of ordinary habits of looking. Their transcendence is not religious in any conventional sense, nor is it symbolic. It emerges instead through experience itself. As distractions fall away, the paintings begin to function less as objects than as conditions for consciousness.

This spiritual dimension distinguishes Reinhardt from many of his contemporaries. Although routinely grouped with the Abstract Expressionists, his ambitions were fundamentally different. Where Jackson Pollock transformed painting into an arena of physical action, Reinhardt pursued absolute stillness. Where Willem de Kooning celebrated gesture and improvisation, Reinhardt methodically erased every visible trace of the artist's hand. His black paintings are not colder than those of his peers; they are quieter. Their drama unfolds internally, in the slow negotiation between eye, mind, and surface.

Storr's installation wisely avoids presenting these works as monuments marking the end of painting. Instead, they remain startlingly alive. Seen together, the repeated format reveals subtle shifts in chromatic temperature, proportion, and spatial rhythm. The serial presentation makes clear that Reinhardt's pursuit of perfection was never mechanical. Each canvas becomes a fresh attempt to approach what he once called "the last painting which anyone can make"—not because painting had reached its conclusion, but because he sought a form so purified that nothing extraneous remained.

The achievement of this exhibition lies in making Reinhardt's severity feel unexpectedly generous. His paintings have long carried a reputation for being forbidding, but they are in fact profoundly accessible. They require no specialized knowledge of modernist theory, only the willingness to remain present. Anyone prepared to give these works the time they demand will discover that they are less about blackness than about perception itself. The longer one looks, the less certain one becomes that black is ever simply black. Reinhardt's greatest accomplishment was not to empty painting of meaning, but to reveal how inexhaustible the act of seeing can be.

–John Kelly
New York, December 2013