ART CITIES: Paris-Al Held
A pioneer of hard-edged abstraction, Al Held created works of great complexity during his 50-year career. Held is considered a prominent figure among second-generation Abstract Expressionists, but his persistent exploration of illusionistic potential within abstraction and theoretical attitudes consistently defied many of the labels of post–Abstract Expressionist movements.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: White Cube Gallery Archive
An exhibition of watercolors by Al Held is on show at White Cube Paris. An important facet within Held’s exploration of form, color and space, this selection is testament to the ‘sheer, sensuous joy’ that Held felt when working with the medium and lends insight to the visionary, hard-edged abstraction that preoccupied the artist throughout his career. Joyfully chromatic, with many using a warm color palette, Held’s watercolors form a distinct body of work, demonstrating how he positioned the discipline in parallel to painting; they were a place where he could freely formulate ideas and willfully progress his imagery. This group of works was painted exclusively in Italy, where he maintained a studio from the late 1980s onwards following his prestigious American Academy residency in Rome. To provide him with a place to work in creative isolation, Held purchased a historic farmhouse in Umbria to complement his New York abodes, a Manhattan loft and Catskills barn. Associated in his early years with a generation of American abstract painters, Held was drawn to Europe early on in his career, taking advantage of the GI Bill to move to Paris between 1951 and 1953, and acquaint himself with the Old Masters and European avant garde. Later on, when he spent time in Italy, Held committed to an intensive study of Renaissance painting, in order to widen his vocabulary at the service of his increasingly complex and monumental paintings. Produced around the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Italian watercolors are suffused with light, appearing almost translucent as if lit from within. Most profoundly, watercolor offered Held a way to fill his images with light, lifting his solid forms into weightless mass. In these works several of which are extremely large in scale, Held focused on constructing multidimensional space through a command of paradoxical structures and layered perspectives. Playing with a muscular geometry, and exploiting his demonstrable facility in draftsmanship, Held harnessed the medium’s potential for transparency to layer and fuse his forms, resolving his semi-illusionistic compositions with an immediacy that belies their carefully organised interlocking structures. Held’s status as an exceptional colorist as well as a pioneer of hard edge abstraction is confirmed by his watercolors. Colliding perspectives and impossible trajectories, they produce the feeling of vast and vertiginous volumetric expanse, as if we are looking on the edge of ever-receding, three-dimensional space in which sinuous ribbons thread through patterned planes and architectonic forms loom large towards the viewer with magical intensity. The repeated motif of immense interlocking rings set in deep recessive space reflects his work on public murals at the time, while the domes, arcades and coffering might point to Italian Renaissance architecture. Both finished works and prologues to the paintings, Held’s watercolors visualise a depth of understanding beyond human perception, touching as they do on themes as unfathomable as multidimensionality and String Theory. Reflecting his preoccupation with the poetic re-interpretation of scientific theory and his thoughts on the multiverse, Held was able to channel the past and the future into these luminous, visionary works.
Photo: Al Held, Particular Paradox #8, 1999, Watercolor on paper mounted on board, 50 × 83 in. (127 × 210.8 cm), © Al Held, Courtesy the artist and White Cube Gallery
Info: White Cube, 10 Avenue Matignon, Paris, France, Duration: 19/4-27/5/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://whitecube.com/
