ed clark - reviews

Clark's paintings involve huge swaths of color sweeping across the canvas's field; colors which, for all their surface homogeneity, are fields of turbulent luminosity. Much has been made of the painter's technique. He sweeps paint across the canvas with a pushbroom. He paints with the canvas lying on the floor of the studio, while he pushes the broom across the canvas, mixing the paints that he first pours onto the canvas.

The results are unusual. The compositions often seem to have no beginning or end, and the resulting structural components are obscure. This can not only be unusual, it can be disturbing. Even within the world of the painterly abstraction, where reference points to a world outside of the relationship between paint and canvas can be haphazard at best, Clark's paintings, with their total surrender to unconscious, chance forces, reduce that relationship to almost zero.

Abstract paintings often let the viewer at least appreciate the deft brush stroke of the artist, the work of the hand mixing or blending colors; or in the case of, say, the drip technique of a painter like Jackson Pollock, the way the gestural action of the artist who throws paint on the canvas. None of that applies here.

Therefore, when looking at these paintings, you are really left on your own. In this sense, one could say that Clark's paintings embody that wonderful phrase from Kant, which J. H. Bernard translates into English as "purposiveness without purpose" (Kant 62), which the philosopher claimed was the basis for judging beauty. In this connection, it is useful to remember that the most extensive publication to date on Clark's work is entitled For the Sake of the Search.