Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Sylvia Plimack Mangold
American; 20th-century
New York, NY: Craig Starr Gallery (Exhibition: Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Tapes, Fields, and Trees, 1975-84)
85%
Thirty-Six Inch Closeness. 1976. Acrylic and pencil on canvas
Mangold tends to lose herself when she lapses into pretty design 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 sense of how paintings work "as paintings." This piece, then, is a masterstroke for the way its slightest representational bits (painted ruler at the right side; trompe l'oeil tape around the edges) make its central swath of untouched canvas into, simultaneously, a part of a picture and a glaringly literal thing. The point isn't that the painting does this, but rather, precisely how. The play of competing painted textures around the edges, for instance, sets up a rhythm that the beige expanse in the middle swallows up; the painted ruler is the most visually forthright thing here, but it takes up so small a fraction of the picture that any amount of attention you give it inevitably gets inverted by the rest of the image. The ruler is "formally" much realer than the canvas, but of course the former is a painted illusion and the latter is telling the truth. (TFS, 2024)