![if statement in stella architect if statement in stella architect](http://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/201224011546-02-stella-tennant-restricted.jpg)
It is on attempting to make design decipherable, to make it conform to some unifying principle, that the scale of the paintings and their actual shapes fully emerge. This adjustment reveals a complexity of design which is at once compellingly lucid, and also compellingly evasive of comprehension. The effect of the colors is that of a kind of spectral luminosity, and in this sense the eye is caught by the sheer brightness of the color before it perceives the way in which color is deployed.
IF STATEMENT IN STELLA ARCHITECT SERIES
He applies the paint thinly so that the substance is reduced to an absolute minimum, and there is almost no reflecting gloss as there was in his series of asymmetrically-shaped canvases last year. Stella is now predominantly using Day-Glo paints by tinting certain of them with white, he has introduced a new range of pastel colors which have a peculiarly feverish gleam and pallor. In the order of their impact, color, I think, is the most instantly arresting. There are several distinct changes in their makeup which account in part for this difference. They seem to declare themselves in a much more instantly arresting way, and in a way that is altogether different from Stella’s earlier work. On a purely visual level, much more is happening, and is happening ungovernably, not wildly, as this might imply, but certain of the paintings have a vivid, almost clamorous beauty to them. What I see with these paintings seems to be at a further remove from the artist. To put it bluntly, with Stella’s most recent series of paintings I am less caught up by a peripheral awareness that what I see issues explicitly from the artist’s choice and from the restraints of his mind and hand. My reason for stating it is that the feeling, which was for me so uniquely, often obtrusively, a part of the experience of looking at Stella’s earlier striped paintings, is significantly less a part of the experience of looking at his latest paintings. I am here encapsulating a diffuse and fluctuating feeling, something that almost every critic who writes on Stella touches on in one way or another. Never far from my mind, however, is the feeling that what I am yielding to is something that is at once utterly arbitrary, and yet not so because of the coercive logic with which it is constructed. There is, in a sense, such a dislocation between the actualness, almost the practicalness, of the painting, and that which is affecting about it, that I would be aware of myself shifting between states of mind being awed by the fact of the painting, its coherence, and the kind of immutable authority which constructs this fact, or else tentatively yielding to the strangeness and beauty of what it is I’m actually seeing. If Stella’s art amounted to no more than this, it would not carry the weight that it unquestionably does what makes it so difficult to come to terms with, at least for me, is the feeling of uncertainty on looking at a painting as to whether it is the absolute authority which the painting represents that persuades and moves one, or the beauty of the thing itself (I am here thinking particularly of Stella’s symmetrically-shaped striped canvases). With Stella’s work prior to the asymmetrical canvases from 1966, it has seemed to me that qualitative distinctions have been almost meaningless, or at least irrelevant in the face of the extraordinary completeness and succinctness with which Stella had presented a set of decisions. Not only are the distinctions between paintings which succeed or fail more conspicuous with Stella’s latest series of paintings, but in my experience of them anyway, because one is distinctly moved by one and less or not at all by another, there is more point in discussing them in these terms and in making qualitative distinctions. Within the terms of Stella’s work, both series manifest a new kind of flexibility which somehow provides the latitude for a painting to emerge more conspicuously as a success or a failure, or even to succeed in parts.
![if statement in stella architect if statement in stella architect](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Bzgo673p6Hg/hqdefault.jpg)
This is not a statement about the relative quality of the paintings-in fact, I think certain paintings from Stella’s newest series are the finest he has ever made-it is a descriptive statement about the general tenor of the paintings. ONE THING IS, I THINK, true of both Stella’s newest paintings and the asymmetrically shaped canvases which he exhibited last year-that they are fallible in a way that Stella’s paintings have never been before.