Back to the Future

Louise P. Sloane has been making paintings for around five decades, give or take a few years, a pursuit she still finds engrossing, not surprising in a medium that has served humans as a means of expression for millennia—surely passing the test of time. From the 1970s onward, Sloane—who is a maximalist posing as a minimalist—has focused on structure, materiality, texture, text, and, above all, color. Her surfaces were often pared down to one or two hues in her early work but eventually, she added more, at first mostly subsurface, the multiple layers sandwiched beneath adding depth and density to the painting while the reflection and refraction of physical light skittering across the surface activated its subtle luster. Often working in series, Sloane has opted for a progression that is slow, meticulous, suited to her temperament, the paintings submitted to an exhaustive investigation of combinations and permutations, reveling in a process that is hands-on, empirical, and adamantly not predetermined. Instead, she asks herself constant questions, finding the answers to them in the paintings as she proceeds—as well as new questions.

The approximately twenty works in this dazzling exhibition offers us an overview of her production from 1976 – 2023. Despite her allegiance to modernist objectivity and formal issues, her vision of the non-objective is mixed with personal intimations, even if they are scrambled, half-concealed. We’ve come a long way from the days when subjectivity was considered a lapse in ideological rigor by certain abstractionists. It is also hard to believe that any artist today thinks that the work they make is not a consequence of their personal circumstances, however obliquely and whatever form that work might take. As for representational art, Sloane confesses that even if she is a non-objective painter, landscape has been a source of inspiration. (And how could it not, when, if you draw a horizontal line, then vertically bisect it, you’ve made a proto-landscape?)

Sloane, during her long career, has experimented with monochrome, Op Art, Color Field, P & D, and geometric abstraction—of the soft-edged variety, not hard, embellished by the addition of other imagery, such as text, but so overwritten it looks like filagree. Geometric abstraction has been typical of her practice since around the late 1990s – early 2000s, a style that is enjoying a surge of renewed interest. She Intentionally adopted an artisanal, handmade approach for its differences, surprises. (We are not robots, after all.) And despite working in series, each painting is autonomous, sustained by its own substantial presence, although she might rev up its punch level by employing a multiple-panel format.

An artist of independent mind, Sloane is a feminist but does not directly refer to the gender wars that have roiled the recent past. Among the few women abstractionists who made the kind of work Sloane was interested in was Agnes Martin, a groundbreaking figure who occupies a prominent place in the upper tiers of her pantheon of great artists. Her early influences, however, were mostly male, by default, as were those of many women artists of her generation (who were finally banding together to demand the long overdue acknowledgment they merited). She was much drawn to the moody and extraordinarily sensuous encaustic paintings of Brice Marden, the buoyant canvases of Morris Louis, and the clean geometries of Josef Albers, early Frank Stella, and Richard Anuszkiewicz. Anuszkiewicz, whom she admired, in a memorable exchange that took place in the early 2000s, encouraged her to use more, and more explosive colors. Sloane was all in, in what was essentially a kind of weaponizing of divisionism: the juxtaposition of complementary or high contrast colors that was blended by the eye, creating the maximum brilliance possible where they met, equivalent to the shimmer of actual light. A phenomenon observed by Michel-Eugène Chevreuil, it was the definitive technique adopted by Post-Impressionists such as Georges Seurat.

Sloane’s early paintings were made using beeswax mixed with pure pigment. The malleability and lushness of the material, as well as its lambency, were immensely seductive, and, fortunately for a young artist, they were also affordable. Sloane said beeswax was sold in 20 lb. bricks and pure pigment could also be purchased by the pound and was far less expensive in that form. For years, Sloane mixed her own paint but said that she couldn’t always control the color. That could prove exciting, but it also made it difficult to match colors precisely which has obvious disadvantages. The medium was also inflexible, allowing no further changes once applied. By the late 1980s, she decided to move on to acrylic and paste.

In the beginning, she would partition vertically oriented painting into stacked horizontal bands of muted colors that were close in hue and value but by 1977, she became fixated on pattern, relying, as always, on the grid as her structuring device. It would be scored into the painting’s surface as a scaffold of sorts, a field often divided into halves, thirds, or quadrants. The grid was filled in by applications of encaustic to form herringbone-like sequences of impressed marks. There is a handsome triptych (1980 569) in shades that seem an evocation of a misty morning (barely there grey, green, and violet). Each panel is imprinted with the allover herringbone pattern of that period, and linked together by a delicately incised, geometric design that appears in all three panels. Some others from the 1980s are more robust, notable for the richness, the umami, of their saturated colors--the sumptuous purpled blue of Garnet (1983), warmed by an undertone of red; Navajo (1984), its oxblood field flickered by turquoise blue, a nod to the palette of native American arts; and the beautiful Twilight (1986-87, its afterglow of day’s blues twinkling in the light lingering against the tessera-like surface.

Sloane began to insert text into her work by the 2000s. From ancient pictograms and other linguistic emblems, she updated her verbal elements to more contemporary sources—songs, poems, the writings of those close to her, as well as excerpts from her journals. While the text, generally, is scribbled over and not meant to be read (with a few exceptions, a word or phrase here and there), it is meant to be sensed, adding a poignancy and emotional resonance to the work that wasn’t evident before. These embedded, intimate stories underscore the truth that much of our lives, our essential being, is internalized, an enigma to others, and even to ourselves, with only surface cues to hint at what is submerged.

A matter-of-factness and a disarming playfulness also prevail, as when discussing process. For Sloane, that can sometimes be just another word for whatever (ingeniously) works. She has assembled an arsenal of tools, some of which are commonplace, such as a palette knife which she might use to impress a pattern into the encaustic, then heats it to fuse the layers of beeswax and damar resin crystals together. Or she might discover that the nail on her worktable is perfect to inscribe a grid into the painting’s surface. My favorite, however, is the pastry tube or pastry bag plumped with molding paste that she writes with, wielding it with the dexterity and panache of a Michelin pastry chef. Necessity, we should remember, is the mother of invention, or perhaps the reverse (apologies, dads).

One of the most moving of her works is Collective Sorrow (2001), made in the heartbreaking wake of the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001. It is Sloane’s tribute to the many who perished that day, marking one of the most momentous divides in our history, of a before and then an after that changed everything, the breach unfathomable. The painting’s size is modest, as if to hold grief closely, within the span of our arms, and depicts a grid of small, raised, gritty-looking rectangular units. On the back of the painting is a number: 2081. It represents the count of people declared dead at the time Sloane completed the work. Each unit is painted with the color of a different skin-tone, a testament to the ethnic diversity of those killed. Numbers fill each unit, written on top of each other, again and again, crowded together until 2,081 was reached. The entire surface is covered with a layer of white, as if the painting had been on site, the white signifying the ashen remains that obliterated all differences. At the center is a square, the location, and within it is a circle, ground zero.

In the decade before this, her inquiries resulted in the adaptation of a square within a square or a square within a rectangle that has become a signature motif. Over the years, the range of colors found within a single painting has expanded and her colors have brightened, seismically escalating in impact. Celeste (2018), for example, trumpets a blast of red and yellow, and Dangerzone (2018), thrusts an intense, high-pitched red square into the viewer’s space that looks as if it is ready to detonate. Diamond shapes, another modernist staple evoking Mondrian as well as Malevich, have also been added to her lexicon. Sloane began thinking about Suprematism some time ago, and more recently, about the paintings of symbolist artist Hilma af Klint, both characterized by a formality glossed with the mystical. Mondrian and Malevich inspired her to tilt the square, animating the surface further, pushing her paintings into a new direction. One of the most recent works in the exhibition is Ascension (2022), its red, yellow and blue downshifted into lavender, baby blue, and a yellow red that becomes an orange of sorts. It is quieter, although the composition is still divided into quadrants and embellished with an allover pattern of raised, calligraphic twists. The contrast in color is far less extreme, permitting field and pattern to inhabit their shared space far more decorously. In the foreground are three diamonds that seem to be wafting upward weightlessly, the overall impression that of the formal and the material translated into a more mystical state, touched by grace.

While I liked the title of the popular 1985 sci-fi, time-travel movie, Back to the Future, I was thinking more about the idea of circularity and continuity, of reclamation and perpetuation than I was about crashlanding into the past in a plutonium-powered DeLorean. To be honest, I didn’t quite remember what the film was about beyond that, but it seemed an apt title for a retrospective, for Sloane’s back to the future, half-century circling. In it, her past work mingles with recent work in the present tense, each illuminating the other, poised on the threshold of the future, of what’s next. So, it seems, it’s about time-traveling after all, as art transports us in and out of time, itself the ultimate time-traveler.

Lilly Wei

Lilly Wei is a New York-based art critic, writer, independent curator and journalist whose primary interest in global contemporary art.