Untitled

From the beginning of his career, in the 1950s, Robert Ryman pragmatically tested the means of painting, deploying a variety of supports and an equally catholic range of utensils and paints. In each of his small paintings from 2010 and 2011 (all untitled), a rough square of white oil paint floats off-kilter on a square stretched-cotton canvas. This white paint is backed by a darkly saturated, light-absorbing ground made of a variety of colors, including rust, pistachio and deep dove gray, providing a sense of contrast that pushes the lighter pigment into visible relief.

When discussing “late style,” critics often note a tendency toward radical changes in method or technique. Such shifts have arguably transpired here: In the past, Ryman allowed properties of his supports, whether the dim sheen of steel or the fibrous Brown of corrugated paper, to serve as pictorial incident. By contrast, this ground is coated completely in paint. But rather than implying some kind of denouement, these pieces acknowledge that amid the “endless possibilities” Ryman once described as the richness of painting, there are only more questions.
© Excerpted from Suzanne Hudson, “Robert Ryman,” Artforum, no. 4, December 2013, 260–261.

The Pinault Collection first showed this work in 2023 at the Punta della Dogana  in Venice, as part of the exhibition Icones.