William Conlon: Paintings 1969–1981

From his art student days, first at the School of Visual Arts in New York, then at Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, William Conlon has been preoccupied with the character of abstract painting and with the search for its proper subject matter. Particularly at Yale, lively in the mid-1960s, he was exposed to all the intellectual art currents available from New York. Not much was missed in those days by a powerful studio department hospitable to a variety of critical and artistic opinions. At one time or another Conlon worked or studied with Al Held, Jack Tworkov, Robert Morris, and Frank Stella. He was familiar with the development of American abstract art from its beginnings and aware of the critical dictums of Clement Greenberg’s followers that seemed systematically to be narrowing the possibilities for abstraction.

The Abstract Expressionists had given currency to the notion that the artist’s activity—the act of painting—was the true subject matter of art. The risks the artist took, the choices made, were moral choices. Alas, these noble attitudes released every dauber from restraint and encouraged heroic claims to be made for personal ineptitude. In reaction, many artists tried to get themselves out of their paintings. Precision and impersonality of finish eradicated gesture and eliminated many of the ambitious who could pour and splash paint but who couldn’t control a brush or roller sufficiently to achieve an immaculate surface or a hard edge.

Another reaction came from so-called Pop Art. In its most significant phase this movement turned attention to the crucial issue of form. Johns and Oldenburg in their distinct ways raised the question of what we are seeing—a flag or a painting, a typewriter or a sculpture? Heroics were inappropriate to an inquiry that brought illusion and fantasy back to art, and usually by way of the commonplace, though exploitation or mockery of heroic scale became part of the visual vocabulary of the time.

Many abstract formalists declared for the primacy of color, allowing colors to interact lyrically with only moderate controls, and adjusting or editing the results. Others among them subjected color interaction to geometrical formats—squares, targets, stripes, chevrons, and other figures—for the orderliness and discipline these afforded and possibly to achieve subtler, clearer, or more intense results.

Conlon found it difficult to relate these and other contemporary critical and artistic developments to his own instincts and interests. It troubled him that so much emphasis was placed on what abstract painting was about philosophically or on how it should be managed technically to conform to the categorical imperatives of recent art history. He did not feel that his activity as painter was what abstraction was about. It wasn’t about flatness and fidelity to the rectilinearity of the painting support. It wasn’t about immaculacy. It wasn’t about color interaction or architectonics. All of these things, among many others belonging to painting, were devices an artist might use in pursuit of an objectively conceived subject matter, a communicable content.

Well, what of subject matter? For the abstract artist, it can be both a formidable and an elusive goal. The representational artist has his subject matter before him in the world of appearances. He may treat its data almost any way he likes—indicatively, fully, programmatically—so long as he asserts a system of resemblances that confirms our everyday habits of seeing. He may project a tree or a person as a single brushstroke or struggle to render each leaf or each face in thicket or crowd; or he may see as bizarre events the landscape of the tabletop or the landscapes of the world; or he may see them severely as so many interacting planes. He only simplifies or somewhat digresses from the ordinary vision of things.

The problem is more complex for the abstract or non-representational artist. Subject matter is something to be discovered in the labyrinths of perception. Not only what is seen but the nature and essence of vision is country he explores. For him, vision is not a series of observations or a continuum of effects, not a quality of things, but a web of processes integral to mature, sensual, intellectual, and emotional life. We are dealing with the big computer. In his art, he rediscovers and exploits these interpretive and integrating processes. Vision becomes perception; perception becomes insight that can be shared.

This is an ideal formulation. No one is more conscious of the pitfalls than Conlon. At the same time, it’s a personal matter. An artist brings a certain cast of mind and bias of eye to the skills he’s acquired, or perhaps he’s acquired his technical skills in order to give form to his visual convictions. The sooner he becomes himself the better. Conlon has worked brilliantly to make content intelligible and communicable in his paintings. His sense of the ongoing problem of subject matter has freed his imagination and his creative energies. His contribution, while related to the mainstream of modern abstraction, is also in the vital sense of focus independent of it.

Conlon has said that he did not begin to paint seriously until he left Yale. His art education stimulated him greatly but also defined for him what he did not want. In New York, without a suitable studio, he gave most of his time to drawing. These works, many of them little more than sketches or doodles, began to point the way for him to paintings that he could feel were securely his own.

This was a time for Conlon of “turning inward toward feeling, of turning away from Stella, Greenberg, and Michael Fried, from echoing the framing edge.” At last in a new and sufficient studio in Broome Street, he was free to attempt the large canvases he had had in mind, canvases that would overcome the cramped “wrong scale” of the drawings and provide the arm-sized gestures that had become important to him.

The first of these, Untitled (Alphabet), 1969, was already a breakthrough. Conlon was able to translate the drawing/doodling impulse to a 9′8″ x 12′ format. The subject matter was the tension between the spontaneous and the regular, between informality and formality, between the random mark and the ordered mark. A special interest for Conlon has its source in his drawings of the period, the physicality of the marks, their potential for suggesting movement and elaborating the interactive energies of the forms.

A Conlon painting can often be thought of as a kind of theater in which a drama of relationships unfolds. As with the painting under discussion, the events or narrative play out against or within a neutral or ambiguous space, in this instance against many others a white field. Conlon has said, “A white field is enigmatic. It has no perspectives, no depth. The white is more like a gravitational field. One mark could read as thirty feet deep, another read as on the surface.” Conlon’s forms then become the actors, the dancers, who are themselves the interacting forces that give substance to their spatial envelope.

There is nothing casual or unconsidered in Conlon’s visual choreographies. However free the results may seem, all depends upon a precise ordering of space. Conlon’s vision involves us with what is there and with what isn’t, with what might be there and with what is there by implication. For instance, Untitled (Shift to Left), 1970, is steadied by an implied “x” in the organization of its forms. White Dwarf, 1970, metaphor for an exploding star, deploys its forces outward from an empty center. And Blue Giant, 1970/71, develops the ideas of rotation and orbit, of defined courses, fixed yet moving. These organizational devices are far from traditional ideas of grid-supported composition. They have everything to do with Conlon’s refinement of eye; directly, perhaps, they are a consequence of the problems imposed by the white field, where, as Conlon has said, “everything becomes equal.”

Possibly also because of the equalizing function of the white field, paint handling and manipulation become critical to these paintings. The quality and character of the marks help them to assert a pace of their own. Color, density, texture are all elements in the substantial establishment of the forms. Paint handling gives a special dynamic to Conlon’s shapes, all calibrated to the particular painting’s dominant movements and interactive verve.

Overlapping and seeing through forms becomes important for Conlon with such paintings as Crossing Over, 1971, and Red Giant, 1971/72. The intention was to present simultaneously different viewing experiences. The interplay between gesture and geometry is one of psychic and emotional opposites. In these paintings, Conlon was not after balance. What he wanted was a change of focus on the part of the viewer, a shift in thinking or cognition.

With Untitled (Purple and Black are Coming Back), 1973, which Conlon has described as a transitional painting, he pushed expressionistic handling and geometric form to a new height of tension. The painting’s energies are formidable, as multiple overlapping spaces involve themselves with the picture plane. The layered space crowds the canvas with forces that seem about to break out of it, and yet the whole floats, held to a delicate suspension, a huge fish in a small tank.

Black Jack, 1973, is a less menacing variation of Purple and Black. Both paintings are transitional in the sense that they begin Conlon’s departure from an art oriented directly to the real world. With Einstein’s Waltz, 1974, Conlon’s overlapping planes become transparent or are implied. Sometimes the planes are adumbrated by coordinates. The pictorial dynamics are mainly internal and all the parts fully interdependent. Conlon has said, “If I have to move one thing I have to move everything.” Space is articulated in and through the various planes and by way of reference points. His aim has been, in his words, “a physics of vision.”

In such paintings as Fermi’s Temple, 1975, 20th-Century Limited, 1976, and Einstein’s Waltz II, 1976, Conlon pursued a radical simplification of means to achieve complex ends. The first of these paintings is the most severe and elegant, holding its floating planes in harmony through a system of reductive but utterly clear notation. In 20th-Century Limited, the overlapping planes extend beyond the pictorial space. Extension and enclosure are made aspects of the same system. As the painting’s planes go beyond the limits of the painting, so also does the space seem to be coming in upon itself.

Conlon has said that he chose his title because “Einstein used a train to explain relativity.” Einstein’s Waltz II offers a self-sustaining visual logic, in which four squares within the picture frame interact with two that float beyond the pictorial borders.

Broome Street Boogie, 1977/78, is predicated on the second of the Einstein paintings, but here the concern is more clearly with boundaries and edges, with the physical sensation of seeing and reacting to spaces. The viewer is invited to give in to the complexity of the painting without trying to solve it. In this work, Conlon used for the first time a black square centered. Normally the black square would be dominant, but Conlon has so adroitly managed his materials that the white negative squares read as positive. Far from being a game, the painting addresses the realities of perception through the ambiguities implicit in the mechanics of seeing, a primary means in human orientation.

The notion of the viewer recomposing the pictorial elements has strong appeal for Conlon. With Paradox Motel, 1978/79, and more pointedly with Haley’s Comet, 1979, he provided a number of options: the paintings need not be seen in only one way. In fact, Paradox Motel provides a kind of planar dialogue that prevents the establishment with the viewer of a single image. The painting is contemplative; it has considerable complexity and clear readability, but our inclinations are to go with it rather than to understand it, to partake of its unresolved shifts and combinations, difficult to fix as the dappling of sunlight on leaves and water. Haley’s Comet is a bit more energized, somewhat more committed to motion, but the viewer must bring his own spontaneity to the accord of the pictorial elements. The painting holds too many possibilities, too many internal logics, to serve a unified image.

It was perhaps inevitable that Conlon would paint an identical picture in two versions. “What is likeness?” Conlon seems to be asking. The Blues Brothers, Sam and Dave, 1979, painted in two panels, is like and not alike, identical in feature but different in character. Comparing the two parts, the viewer is drawn into the comedy of identity.

Red Shift II, 1978/80, brings us back to the story of the centered black square overlapped by two squares of white. But here a further complication has been introduced, a dot pattern interface of white on black, echoed elsewhere in reverse. The planes now have a pulsation, a syncopation, if you will, that raises and lowers the intensities of shapes within the organized whole, as our eyes travel over the surface and into depths implied.

With Sunset City, 1980, and Red Shift Journey, 1980, Conlon’s work attains a new density and complexity. These paintings have more the feeling of collage, of successive overlay, though the eye continues to move spatially through line and through dot patterns. Possibly the relationship these have to a grid support make these paintings appear more formal and more decorative than earlier works. Their load of data is so considerable as to make the possible combinations seem fugal.

Greater clarity (though not therefore simplicity) returns with Constructavision, 1980, and Columbus Circle, 1980, where overlapping squares, arcs, and implied circles play with and against a variety of patterns and motifs to give us an exquisitely controlled but liberated sense of space. The story that Conlon tells here and elsewhere is of that ambiguous borderline where seeing and feeling are one and of the pleasures and vagaries of the eye that shape the visible world but never fix it. The subject matter is change.