HARD EDGE TEE

Balboa Pavilion Gallery. 1964. Hard-Edge painting gained its name from the clean rim of its shapes. However, it is not the "hard-edge" per se that is significant. Rather it is the conception of form, space, and color as segments of an indivisible whole. One cannot separate color and shape in Hard-Edge painting. They are one and the same. More properly, these flat shapes in unbroken color should be described as colorforms. The way in which the colorforms couple together, each dependent for its definition by the contour of its neighbors, establishes space as a continuous sheet running border to border. While illusory perspective is wiped out by this procedure, the adherence of colorforms to the surface picture plane is not static, motionless, petrified. On the contrary, the sheet of interlocked colorforms appears to advance and recede as the eye focuses now on one segment and now another. In its particular way Hard-Edge painting enlarges our consciousness of boundless space, and in that sense can be said to enhance our Beingness in this sometimes anxiety-ridden, sometimes exhilarating age. As if that was not enough, the paintings by the eleven participating artists I find immensely enjoyable simply as optical encounters. On that level they are their own raison d'être. Need more be said?