My eyes can’t stop. They’re riding high along the light gray stripe that bisects one of Mary Corse’s paintings featured in her new solo exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York, “Presence in Light.” After they reach the tippy-top point of this large, square, canted wall work, they flutter across a field of faint white strokes that initially appear as a best-in-class stippled, fine furniture finish but—with a tiny head tilt—transform into stealthy, translucent, staccato brush hits made by a seasoned artist. The work is austere, elegant and minimal. It reminds me a little of Barnett Newman’s famous vista-view, mid-century abstract “zip” paintings but contained in the pervasive American diamond shape of roadway signs intended for warning wayward drivers to pay attention. The subtle varieties of barely-there acrylic color and the thousands of light refractions from Corse’s long-favored glass microspheres—the same medium used in street markings—give me an unavoidable sense of the present moment—a distinct here in the center of now. Walking by the work and picking up poignant shifts in light makes me mindful that my perspective—as well as the particle-and-wave energy that illuminates it—is always changing.
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In an interview Corse gave while her major retrospective was on exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art a few years ago, she made it clear that her current work was much less about the objective reality of “an outside world” than a way to provide an inner experience, through perception, for viewers. Why has the notion of perception in all its forms—or lack thereof—deeply concerned countless artists through the ages? I suspect because it can vary so greatly. This variety, of course, has caused us as many degrees of conflict as it has generated understanding, cooperation and growth. Amidst the minimal and conceptual milieu of the late 1960s, when Corse came of age as an artist, it was paramount to the investigation in many art practices—and continues to be today.
Corse, like other Californian artists associated with the Light and Space movement—from James Turrell to Helen Pashgian—made it their mission to retrain eyes, re-align minds and—I would hazard to say—open souls, even. The simple quiet moment that........