Word: pigment
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...seemed to set itself against a whole tradition of animal as heroic metaphor. And for those who (understandably) yearned for a return to the French pictorial tradition of luxe, calme et volupte, the sight of Dubuffet's monstrous kippered nudes squashed flat in their beds of pigment was not only an affront, it was like the slamming of a door on a much loved tradition. Such Dubuffets were shocking in a way that no Picassos, by the mid-'50s, could possibly have been...
Dubuffet's interest in the rudimentary and the inchoate meant that conventional subjects were dissected into their most ignoble components. His excremental landscapes and turnip-men, set down in meandering lines and harrowed clods of pigment, were not ordinary -- they were frighteningly banal. "It is where the picturesque is absent," he remarked, "that I am in a state of constant amazement...
...Kenny Scharf sports edges decked with plastic dinosaurs and rockets. Larger-than-life wooden silhouettes - two birds, for instance, or a garland of branches - shoot up around the landscapes of Alan Herman. More established figures are also working in the same vein. Howard Hodgkin, whose canny strokes of pigment hint at enclosed views, sweeps paint across the frame to twit its pretensions as the final proscenium...
...paint on the canvas looks sluggish and frozen, like cake icing. (In the early '60s, Morley did put the pigment on with icing nozzles.) Its dull turbulence parodies the violence implicit in expressionist paint handling. The heavy brush stroke is no longer an index of earnestness; it quotes strong feeling without necessarily endorsing it. Morley's blend of coolness and violence has some of the hypnotic impact of early Warhol. But it is far more complicated and nuanced, and it is free from overtones of chic...
...rejected hard-and-fast distinctions between painting and poetry. He loved words. PHOTO, announces the writing on a 1925 canvas that, being mostly blank, is clearly not a photograph; and then, around a shapeless blob of blue pigment, the wiry script declares that "this is the color of my dreams." Yearning is fixed in a depicted absence. "In my pictures there are tiny forms in vast empty spaces," Miró once explained. "Empty space, empty horizons, empty planes, everything that is stripped has always impressed...