Four Squares 1974

Stephen Antonakos has created ‘Four Squares’ with a series of repetitive and geometric marks in thin, clean strokes. It’s a red line drawing, or a painting that looks like one. I wonder what Antonakos was thinking when he made this! Maybe he was thinking about the grid, or maybe he was looking at Agnes Martin and thinking about the square as a philosophical space. Or, he was thinking about how to make an artwork look like a diagram? I can almost feel the way Antonakos repeated those marks, trying to get the lines just right. It’s a delicate balance between precision and intuition, right? In this piece, he's playing with the idea of the grid, like so many artists have. He’s having a conversation with other artists across time. What I like about this is that it’s so simple, yet it asks so many questions.