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Robert Motherwell, 1962, oil and collage on paper 73.7 x 58.4 cm

 

 Robert Motherwell
From Below, 1975, acrylic, pasted canvas, and pasted papers on canvas mounted on board, 182.9 x 91.4 cm

(Sam Cornish su Abstact Critical - alla fine precisa che solo alcuni collage funzionano nel modo descrtitto qui sotto)

I suppose anyone and everyone receptive to this kind of thing has felt something similar, has been immediately struck by a picture on entering the room in which it is hung. All pictures are set-up to respond to being looked at. But in these works, and in others in the exhibition, this sensation is central to how the images function. These works are – at least in large part – about vision, or rather, a particular type of visual experience. Here vision is figured as something which happens, and happens quickly, a momentary coming together of seeing and the thing seen; a sudden opening of the eyes, a flash of light, the pulling back of a curtain.

[...]

 

 Robert Motherwell, Xylol, 1977, acrylic, paper, printed paper, and packing tape collage on canvas board, 101.6 x 76.2 cm 

The fragment of collaged material at the centre of the collages plays an important role in how we see the whole. First because the fragment creates the collage’s sense of space (there is no seeing without a thing seen), determining our distance from the scene pictured; some of the collages introduce a horizon line which works to the same ends. And second because the fragments activate the space they exist in: each is placed to give the impression that it has travelled out of distance, from further back in the picture’s space, from where it has been flung upward and toward the viewer, and has then been caught and clarified in the foreground.
Motherwell very self-consciously (in a couple of works too self-consciously for my taste) looks back to the papier collé Picasso and Braque first made a little over a century ago. [1] Though it can open up with a hazy light, Picasso and Braque’s Cubism remains an intimate art of enclosed spaces; Braque understood his collages as visual translations of the availability of objects to touch. Motherwell enlarges this space, makes it more expansive, aerated, shifts its focus from ground to sky. In part he did this by drawing on Matisse. Motherwell empties out and destabilises Matisse’s architecture, using its restraint but imbuing it with a sense of motion (are some of these works non-gestural action paintings?) and a personality at once elegant, vulnerable and defiant.