Word: stella
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...retrospective affirms the panache and mental horsepower that make Frank Stella the grand maximalist of abstract painting...
...Stella now took the minimalist obsession with fabrication (as distinct from handmaking) and used it to carry all that was maximal: sweeping gestures, textural scribbles, hot collisions of color, a romantic sense of barely sustained cohesion. But Stella's "new look" of spontaneity was itself a kind of theatrical fiction. The pragmatic essence of the early paintings lies not far below the gesticular surface of his work after 1975. Nevertheless he was putting himself at some risk. His new paintings, as they got loopier and more & baroque, looked like a critique of the high cool and decorous lyricism that...
...flat solid background plane from which the bright templates sprouted as figures on a ground, and however "wild" the color seemed, it was always anchored within the coordinates of collage or, at least, given the enormous size of pieces like Inaccessible Island rail, 1976, of screw-bolt-and-bracketage. Stella's 3-D paintings all descend from constructivism, and one soon realizes that they mark the end of its tradition with a barrage of fireworks: there is something funereal as well as celebratory about the sight. It seems improbable that anyone (other, perhaps, than Stella) will manage to wring more...
...Stella had to kick free of the literal basis of color-field painting; the flat color on a flat plane, the "dictatorship of the medium," had killed off the project of making abstract forms that, by moving in deep pictorial space, reawakened one's sense of the body. His way of doing this, in paintings from the Indian Birds series like Ram gangra, 1978, was to get rid of the solid back plane and replace it with a mesh support, so that the shapes seemed to hang in the air. The relatively sedate movement of form in Stella's earlier...
...long afterward, the vogue for graffiti would release floods of glitzy dreck that shared the same eye-grabbing fervor. Indeed, both were grounded in the same area, a sense of common life, but only Stella was able to make it work aesthetically. Those who think abstract art should betoken "spirituality" are bound to be put off by the materialist cast of mind that lends its here-and-now toughness to even the most florid of Stella's works. Relentlessly inventive, marred only by the glaring, grinding overcomplication of some of his pictorial machines, he is a paragon of mental horsepower...