Untitled 1963

John McLaughlin made this untitled painting with stripes sometime in the middle of the 20th century. It's really about the simplest moves possible – vertical bands of color on a flat plane, but like Agnes Martin, it's far from simple-minded. I love how the clean edges of the bars declare the surface of the painting to be flat. Yet, there’s something illusory happening too. The white stripes seem to vibrate against the solid orange, almost pushing the orange forward, like some optical trick. I can almost feel the squeegee pushing paint across the surface! The paint is so flatly applied, so deliberately anonymous, that it almost feels like sculpture. Think of Malevich, Mondrian, or even Barnett Newman, you can see McLaughlin is in conversation with them, taking the idea of reductive abstraction and running with it, finding a way to make something deeply meditative out of so little. It’s less about what you see, and more about how you see.