Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jules Olitski
American; 20th-century
Chicago, IL: EXPO Chicago (Yares Art’s Booth)
77%
Judith Juice. 1965. Acrylic on canvas
This painting's thing is to use its orange inverted L and that vanishing seagreen repoussoir at right to make you think that the marquee blue rectangle is a vast undifferentiated expanse (but it isn’t). The colored edges articulate all that blue as a sort of totality, an indefectible unity — there are three things in this painting (orange, green, blue), each of them is whole, and the most important of the three is the blue rectangle, which is a monument to what blue rectangles are. But then you keep looking and you notice that not only are the edges irregular, which is apparent, but also that there are little gradations and tiny errant marks all throughout the blue, which makes it seem both more and less like a whole. At a high level, this is a fairly successful Olitski because it does a great job setting up this wishy-washy ontological play. At a more basic level (which undergirds the higher one, of course), it's successful because of the cluster of green in the lower third on the right that implies further greens up into the blank space above it; because of that spot where the same green band just barely slips its tail under the blue; because there are occasional gaps between the blue and the orange but none between the green and the blue; etc. However, Olitski tends to be a bit better than this when he achieves the same effects through even subtler means (read: thinner, less present segments of colored banding). (2025)