By Donald Kuspit
Steven Manolis’ fifteen Big Small Paintings, all 2024—“Big” because of their conceptual ambition, “Small” because of their size relative to his huge abstract paintings—Black and White, 2017 is seven feet by twelve feet, Redworld, 2019 is eight feet by thirty-two feet--epitomize, with seemingly relentless intensity and cerebral ingenuity, what Kandinsky called the ambition of pure painting: the reconciliation of what he called “the miracle of line and color”(1) while asserting the autonomy of both. It is a dialectical paradox: emphasizing their difference—incompatibility--while “demonstrating” what Kandinsky called their “need” for—unconscious attraction to and interaction with--each other. It is a familiar artistic problem—the reconciliation of form-giving line and colorful content—made all the more difficult--not to say risky—when pure line rather than structured form and pure color rather than colorful objects are to be reconciled, or at least meaningfully engaged, implicated in each other. To my analytic eye and interpretative mind, Manolis’ Big Small Paintings are his most daring, radical, expressive, profound paintings—they articulate, with persuasive deftness and relentless insistence, unconscious conflict, more particularly the inescapable conflict between what Freud called libido, symbolized by pleasurable color, and the death instinct, symbolized by a tangle of black lines, messily swarming over the surface of every Big Small Painting like a huge spider’s web or a nest of insatiable worms. “Black has an inner sound of nothingness bereft of possibilities, a dead nothingness as if the sun had become extinct, an eternal silence without future, without hope.”(2) In his Floridian works Manolis tends to be what Kandinsky called a “Sunday’s child of life.”(3)
The Big Small Paintings are existential paintings—paintings for what the poet Auden called an “Age of Anxiety”—an age that Manolis, now 76, has reached. Living beyond the biblical allotted three score and ten one cannot avoid death anxiety. But if one is a brilliant artist, one can creatively master it, as Manolis does in the Big Small Paintings. Manolis’ color field paintings tend to be a response to the sunshine state that his home state Florida—“land of flowers” and legendary “fountain of youth”—but no colors flourish uninhibitedly in the Big Small Paintings as they do in his other works. I am arguing that Manolis’ Big Small Paintings, like Kandinsky’s paintings, are symbolist, in contrast to his color field abstractions, which are celebrations of color for its own pure sake, whatever familiar associations one may have to them. As the scholars Kenneth Lindsay and Peter Vergo have argued, Kandinsky’s paintings, however nominally “pure,” are a “documentation of (his) unconscious”—“he acknowledged the role the unconscious had played in the creation of his art,”(4) and as such symbolist, as they have convincingly argued. Similarly, Manolis’ Big Small Paintings, “document” the unconscious, plunging more deeply into it than Kandinsky ever did, for the conflict of color and line they convey epitomizes the conflict between the life instinct and the death instinct, while Kandinsky’s color and line have more physical than psychological import, to use his distinction.
What Kandinsky called “the line’s first-ever liberation from that most primitive of instruments, the ruler,” opening the way to “the world of freer graphics,”(5) reaches a kind of crescendo in Manolis’ Big Small Paintings, line all but swamping their color, which tends to exist more as atmosphere than substance. “The slightest inflection of the artist’s feeling is readily reflected in the slightest inflection of line,” Kandinsky writes.(6). Manolis’s lines are not only exquisitely and complexly “inflected,” but run wildly over the color in virtually every one of the fifteen works in the series. As I have argued, in work after work black linesform a dense, huge spider web that covers and contains every color, all but obliterating it, certainly covering and compromising it like a black veil. Sky blue color In Praise of Gold and Turquoise; sunny yellow in Purple Fields (American Camelot); yellow and orange in Tigers (#2); red and yellow in In Praise of Gold and Pyrole Red, blue and yellow in In Praise of Gold and Phthalo Blue; yellow and green in Praise of Gold and Green; yellow in In Praise of Gold and Yellow; yellow and pink in In Praise of Gold and Opera Pink; gold and black in In Praise of Metallica; yellow in Tigers #1 and Tigers #2. In Tigers #1 the maze of lines are white, but they cage in the faded yellow of the tiger, if with less force than the black lines in Tigers #2. Color appears in all the works, but it is more like an atmospheric backdrop to the entangled lines than a forceful presence. It has a faded grandeur—inert splendor--compared to the manically busy lines.
Manolis has said that his lines are derivative from “all the veins detailed in the under arm of one of the arms” of Michaelangelo’s David—he saw the sculpture for the second time in his life in the mid 1990’s in Florence, which is when he noted the veins—noteworthily, they were on “the sling right arm,” suggesting they had an expressionistic energy and verve. For Manolis “those ‘small but detailed vein’ articulations MADE THE DAVID SCULPTURE COME ALIVE.” He was young then—he must have unconsciously identified with the young David--but he is old now. Similarly, he seems to think that the linear articulations in his Big Small Paintings make them come alive, but I suggest that they overrun, certainly compromise, not to say counteract, the luminous colors--lifeless compared to the manically busy lines--all but burying them in several works. Manolis’ association suggests his unconscious identification with Michaelangelo, celebrated “as the most accomplished artist of his era.” It is indicative of Manolis’ ambition, not to say his sense of originality, evident not only in his remarkably imaginative abstractions but in their technique, for as he writes “I know of no other artist working with dripped latex enamel in a supplementary role to the Main Actor (Color) in my works.” But I think line is the main actor in the Big Small Paintings, color being
a backdrop to line’s busyness and intensity. It has more energy than his color. To my eye it seems more inflected than his color, however nuanced that is, and with that more charged with feeling, to recall Kandinsky’s remark. Singling out three artists who have made “a very strong Big Small Painting”—one with “aesthetic, compositional,impact and energy calling”—Manolis argues that Georgia O’Keeffe’s close-ups of “pitula [virginal?) flowers,” Wayne Thiebaud’s “diminutive, powerful and delicious ice cream cones and cupcakes,” and Gerhard Richter’s “profoundly strong, small multicolor squeegee works” are choice examples. But none of those works are as aesthetically, compositionally, and energetically alive—however subliminally morbid, as I suggest—as Manolis’s Big Small Paintings. Richter’s squeegee works fall flat—they are aesthetic dead-ends; O’Keeffe’s flowers are fixed geometrical abstractions, their color energyless; Thiebaud’s tasty treats are manicured rather than “moving.” Indeed, none of the works of the three artists are as dynamic, subtle—alive, intricate—as Manolis’s masterpieces. A better comparison is Kandinsky’s Small Worlds, 1926, a tour de force displaying his mastery of drypoint, lithography, and woodcut—and the extraordinary complexity of his compositions. However different, Manolis’ compositions are on a par with them, and even more subtly intricate and dramatic, all the more so because of their mastery of color and tonality. Manolis’s Big Small Paintings also hold their own with Paul Klee’s etching Small World, 1914: Manolis’ concentrated intensity is a match for Klee’s intricate density. I am arguing that Manolis is as great a master of the Big Small work of art as they are however different this medium, and a greater master because of the existential crisis they symbolically render through the aesthetic difference and expressive conflict between color and line.
