Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Sylvia Plimack Mangold
American; 20th-century
New York, NY: Craig Starr Gallery
85%
Thirty-Six Inch Closeness. 1976. Acrylic and pencil on canvas
Mangold tends to lose herself when she lapses into prettiness on the one hand, full-blown cerebration on the other — her art succeeds when it balances (to be a bit pat) its conceptualism with its basic sense of how paintings work. This piece, then, is a masterstroke for how the slightest bits of representing (ruler at the sides, trompe l'oeil tape around the edges) turn the untreated central swath of canvas into, simultaneously, a part of a picture and a literal thing. It's not that the painting does this that's of value, but precisely how. The play of different competing painted textures around the edge, for instance, sets up a rhythm that the beige expanse swallows up; the painted ruler is the most visually forward thing here, but it takes up so small a fraction of the picture that any bit of focus lent to it inevitably becomes inverted; the ruler is formally much realer than the canvas, but of course the one is a painted illusion and the other is telling the truth. (2024)