Relational Painting #73 1954

Fritz Glarner made this "Relational Painting #73" using oil on canvas, and what strikes me is its devotion to the grid, but a grid gone slightly wonky. Look at how Glarner’s put down these rectangles of grey, black, red, yellow and blue. The paint looks matte, almost dry, like it’s been scrubbed into the canvas. It's cool how the colors don't bleed or blend. Each shape is its own thing, and the relations between them are almost like a conversation. The slightly-off-kilter arrangement has this human, playful feel, even though it’s so geometric. There’s one vertical grey rectangle in the upper-left that kind of holds the whole painting together, but it is slightly askew. It gives the piece a little tension, a bit of a wobble. To me, this is the whole point. This idea of relational painting—how shapes and colors affect each other—is something Josef Albers was into as well. But Glarner is looser, more intuitive, less dogmatic. He is asking us to find meaning in the relationships between the forms. It's about how we piece things together, make sense of the world, one connection at a time.