Giving Shape to Space: Frecon, Sandback, Taylor

Suzan Frecon (b. 1941) is known for abstract oil paintings and works on paper that—as she describes her practice—"speak for themselves." Made over long stretches of time, her work invites the viewer's sustained attention: these, she says, "are not pictures that you look at. They are paintings that you experience." Her work is also included in the group exhibition Studio Conversations, opening April 1 at our Paris gallery, and will be the subject of a solo exhibition this fall at the same location.

In Frecon’s paintings, composition serves as her foundational structure, holding color, material, and light; her compositions are characterized by asymmetrically balanced forms in precise spatial and proportional relationships. “I use measurements for visual reasons,” she has noted, “to achieve an unbalanced equilibrium.” The artist mixes pigments and oils to differing effects, and the visual experience of her work is heightened by her almost tactile use of color and contrasting matte and shiny surfaces. Colors and surfaces vary in terms of density and reflectivity, and areas in the compositions frequently shift between dark and light. Figure can become ground and ground can become figure in, as the artist defines it, a back-and-forth of full and empty space.

Al Taylor (1948–1999) began his studio practice as a painter and continued to work on canvas through the mid-1980s, at which point he started making three-dimensional works. As curator Ulrich Loock describes, “[Taylor] produced his last images on canvas in 1984. He himself, however, did not regard this as a fundamental break: three-dimensional constructions were [in Taylor’s words] ‘a way of getting (leaping) around a simple negative/positive situation in painting which will lead back to painting.’”

Taylor devised a unique and innovative approach to process and materials as he sought to expand the possibilities of vision by exploring new ways of experiencing and imagining space. His sculptures, which he thought of as “tools for vision,” were usually fashioned out of unconventional materials, frequently employing humble and sometimes humorous elements. These idiosyncratic assemblages often appear to vacillate between two and three dimensions with their exploration of line, shadow, and perspective.