Dalet Tet
Morris Louis
MORRIS LOUISE, 1959. ACRYLIC RESIN ON CANVAS.
Paintings in motion, concerned with themselves. Morris Louis was working in the time of abstract expressionism and was himself a leading figure in the movement of ‘color-field’ painting, making bold, gestural works that were as much about the process of their creation as anything else. Using the newly developed acrylic paints and watering them down into a fluid, viscose liquid, he would pour the mixtures from the top of the canvas and allow them to create a waterfall of colour as gravity pulled them to the bottom. Louis did not prime his canvases, meaning the raw fabric would entirely absorb the paints on its surface, staining and penetrating until the paint and the canvas unified into a single entity. This work is from his ‘Veil’ series, and while at first glance it looks like a work of darkness, with a single, organic block of blackness consuming the majority of the square, it reveals a world of process on closer inspection. At the top of the canvas you can see the huge variety of colours that were poured down, and how with each new color added it combined into a dark monolith with none of the vividness that was possible when it existed individually.