a
fter seeing Brice Marden's exhibition of graphite
works at the Matthew Marks Gallery, I dreamed of Wallace
Stevens' 1916 poem, Domination of Black, in Spanish
translation, of all things. I do not speak Spanish, except to mutter
"Si", nor am I accustomed to being haunted in my sleep by
works of art, but haunted I must be. There is, to me, something
so emotional about these seemingly austere drawings that
I feel moved to write about them, even though, in their
mono- or duochromatic plainness, they will not reproduce well
in digital or other photographic format. But there are realities
beyond the digital: to visit in person Marden's works, achieved
between 1962 and 1981, is to behold a most mysterious
presence, to explore minutely deceptively simple surfaces.
Marden's surfaces are anything but simple; they are mirrors,
HYLAND
