Whitney paints canvases with blocks of color on what appears to be an endless grid. The colors seem to follow no fixed pattern, but their arrangement often suggests a playful mood. Yet there is little here that can be called decorative. The lack of predictability in the arrangement of colors suggests that something akin to chance operations is at play in these paintings. And yet, there is the relentlessness of the grid.

It is easy to concentrate on the form, on the grid, with these paintings. For many artists, the challenge of the grid seems much like the challenge poets writing in English have faced for the last century. ...

For one thing, for an artist like Whitney, the grid is more of a tool than anything else. "For me, the paintings are about color, " he says. Color in these paintings is used in a way that's just as intense as the grid is relentless. There is a sense of rhythm, of syncopation, even, in the way the colors play against each other; they seem, at any moment, about to burst out of their framework, much the way that, in African American improvised music, a soloist often strains against the structure of the song form, or the relentless beat.

The way Whitney uses color also gives the paintings a kinetic quality, a sense of movement. There also a sense, with theses paintings, of a suspension of time, which is itself a quality of kinetic representation. "There is no one idea of time" in these paints, says Whitney. "The idea is that the viewer has the freedom to go wherever they want to in the work," he says.

The artist's concentration on the life of colors in these paintings raises another question. The relationship between abstraction and representation, and between the grid and mimesis, seems to have a different twist for Stanley Whitney than Krauss's manifesto-like pronouncements would seem to admit into the realm of possibility. Ask Whitney about his paintings, and he will start talking about color, and about buildings.