Primpsofair 1995

Stanley Boxer made Primpsofair with oil paint, and maybe some gels or other mediums, building up the surface like a landscape. You can see he's really thinking about the physicality of painting as a process. There’s so much going on here materially – the texture, the color, the actual, physical depth of the paint. In the lower left corner, there’s this glob of thick, bright yellow-green paint, almost like a sculptural element attached to the canvas. And then, look at the way he's dragged other colors through it, creating these subtle shifts in hue. It’s like he’s building this whole world out of pure paint, with the black that is dragged through it acting almost like a shadow. Boxer is an artist who understood the conversation that painting can have with itself, a conversation we can participate in too. I always see hints of Jules Olitski in Boxer's love of texture and color, and I like how they show the ambiguity in painting. It's all up for grabs, and there's no right or wrong way to see it.