from "ryman" by Christian Schlegel

Christian Schlegel | ryman | Ricochet Editions | 2022 | 85 Pages

when i saw the rymans in person at dia number one i hadn’t understood the importance of ambient light in the installation of the paintings in a narrow corridor that’s dimly lit fantastic airports for no light and few particles then there’s the wall mounted on the floor on the blue styrofoam maybe a masterpiece then there are some thickly factured paintings  the beautiful brushstrokes atop a bed of seafoam green or another color they seemed quite garish honestly but in a good way and i read too about the other things that ryman would paint on chemex filters pieces of paper things he would paint over little bits of found language like the paradoxical absolute fantastic that simply the movement of the brush the expressiveness i don’t think i’d ever understood what people had said before about abstract expressionism and for ryman it wasn’t abstraction he called it realism and it wasn’t expressing anything that i could understand it doesn’t seem to come from ryman anyway he’s a genius but the affect is somewhat beside him i find it charming and right it’s utterly opposite the judd i’m looking at them now the interviews in their beautiful binding utterly opposite the judd but when i saw these rymans when i saw the brushstrokes that didn’t seem to be abstracted from anything they were just evidence evidence not even of intention or of a human being though they’re also that evidence of the body axis like in hudson that comes from her gorgeous description of the paintings themselves how they’re made how the paint lies on the canvas so it’s realism it’s not from anything it’s not clear what it’s expressing beyond the fact that a person was there experimenting

it’s funny when i think about failure what my relationship to it is i tell myself that i’m ok failing both ryman and judd have a sense of when something fails when it doesn’t work the piece doesn’t come together what’s beautiful is that for both the range between success and failure is mostly not visible to someone who isn’t acquainted to the practice but for the two men it was enormous a chasm they could tell if something worked or not one of the paradoxes of this particular kind of rumination in which i find myself caught sometimes is that it feels fundamentally that to be apart from the ruminating is to have failed it reminds me of the figure michael greenberg uses putting a ball down while desperately holding on to it when i was in the dia gallery space with rachel looking at the rymans a man came in smiling voice of middle age with his daughter they looked at them the paintings and walking out the man said he liked white i thought the tone of the statement was fascinating worked on several levels one feeling that the man seemed to have was that ryman’s paintings were a kind of silence that he needed to break with a comment that they proposed a joke that he needed to acknowledge or rather they were something very obvious that needed to be acknowledged i’m reminded of a poem of sara nicholson’s where someone makes a comment in class and sara compares it to someone else having farted i felt that that’s what the man was trying to dispel on some level the fart of discomfort of ryman’s practice the fragrance of his aesthesis and of course he was making fun of him too he liked white something like well i guess he liked white a joke because the paintings are mostly white although in truth there’s a lot more than white in them as hudson et al acknowledge a fantastic truth of them so evident on longer looking and then there was at least another register that seemed one of honest appreciation he liked white huh he must have really liked painting that way in white and that’s true the joke as a means toward deeper understanding why did he like white so much he didn’t think of the paintings as being white paintings such that later in life in the earlier 2000s as hudson remarks he set about for the first time making white paintings he said it was time to do them finally a little bit more like rausch’s although i need to find a reproduction i don’t know that i’ve seen them there’s the question also in the book which hudson dispatches early on about how to reproduce a ryman painting of course it’s quite difficult you’d need a very good camera h argues that in certain reproductions they’ve been “raked away” her phrase from the wall so you can see a little of the facture i remember saying the word facture in seminar my graduate seminar in critique my senior year i was overcome by terrible rumination i said the word facture which i’d picked up from my german art after 1960 course where i first saw the paintings of richter and hannah darboven which i loved the year before schreibzeit i wonder if i can find my paintings oops my essay on the darbovens i said painting but i meant my essay and so i learned the word facture from brigid doherty referred to in this mit volume of hudsons like tom and mike and i thought it was marvelous to see that word again the other profs in the critique course didn’t know what it meant they asked me what is facture tell me and so i did something like the way the paint goes on but also like the way the paint looks that it feels ryman says this as judd says it you can’t look at reproductions but you have to they don’t work everyone gets that they don’t work but we have to use them it’s a blessed thing i’m able to see any rymans at all ditto the judd i feel very grateful for it and yet it’s never enough you want to see all of them i wonder how many paintings ryman made it would have to be hundreds and hundreds he took a long time that’s another poignancy of ryman’s work that he gives himself a problem and then there’s a certain amount of time he allows himself to try to solve it

Christian Schlegel, from ryman.
Copyright © 2022 by Christian Schlegel.
Reprinted with the permission of Ricochet Editions.