Max Estenger

by Molly Warnock

It’s the color that catches the eye. Disposed in two upright bands—one wide, one narrow—the deep blue runs the full height of the over-life-size painting. Uniformly matte and homogeneously applied, the vinyl emulsion medium appears, from a distance, to open onto impersonal depth, the intense ultramarine hue at once expanding and receding in perception. Particularly in the larger of the two color blocks, the effect brings to mind certain monochromes by Yves Klein, conceived by their author as portals to the immaterial.

The painting nonetheless holds that illusion firmly in check. Decisive in this respect are the two nonpainted stripes that appear toward the right, dividing the blue zones, and along the left lateral edge, inviting inspection of the work’s unframed, fully exposed profile. In each case, one sees clearly that the support has been built up from five distinct, vertically stacked panels: Three are composed of stretched canvas on wood; a fourth, the second from the top, comprises transparent vinyl atop a wooden stretcher; and a fifth, the second from the bottom, has been fabricated from stainless steel on wood. Running perpendicular to the nonpainted bands, and interrupting the blue field from within, the horizontal joins between these panels introduce another order of drawing, one generated in depth by the material enchainment of the component parts. And indeed, we now see, the color itself has a decidedly literal heft, as revealed in cross-section by the extraordinarily precise edges—produced by masking—where the paint layer abuts a nonpainted area of canvas, steel, or clear vinyl. Viewed from the front, the selectively revealed stretcher mediates between this chromatically striking surface and the workmanlike physicality of the whole, carrying the eye into and through the painting to the wall behind it.

By Max Estenger’s

own estimation, Blue, 2020, stands at the origin of the new works gathered in these pages. Exhibited in two successive presentations at Steffany Martz Gallery, New York, in January and February 2023 and at Pazo Fine Art, Kensington, from April to June of the same year—the paintings range in dimensions and formats, including strongly horizontal and vertical constructions as well as perfect squares All deploy the same basic vocabulary of differing panel-types and vinyl emulsion paint, and many, like Blue, make unabashed reference to the artist’s longtime touchstones in postwar American art, from Barnett Newman’s zip compositions and the revealed supports of color field painting to Donald Judd’s objects and stack pieces with stainless steel and Carmen Herrera’s vibrant geometry Yet they equally affirm a distinctive sensibility grounded in Estenger’s unwavering commitment to the continued possibilities of abstraction.

Estenger first outlined the fundaments of this practice over thirty years ago, on the occasion of the exhibition After Reinhardt: The Ecstasy of Denial Held at the Tomoko Liguori Gallery in New York in the fall of 1991, in the wake of an acclaimed Ad Reinhardt retrospective at the Museum of 1 Modern Art , the group show was Estenger’s first exhibition in the city Then aged twenty-seven, he had completed his MFA at the University of California San Diego and moved east just three years prior The youngest participant in a remarkable intergenerational lineup that included Robert Ryman, Tadaaki Kuwayama, Alan Uglow, and Karin Sander, among other artists working in a highly reduced, non-representational vein, he also served (alongside writer Meg O’Rourke) as one of two authors of the accompanying catalogue, penning the eponymous essay ²

At the crux of that account are the Black Paintings Reinhardt painted between 1953 and his death in 1967 Estenger corrects Reinhardt’s oft-repeated assertion that his austere compositions were ultimate statements, declaring them the end of “ a tradition in painting”—but not, significantly, the end of painting Rather, they close what Estenger terms the “behind the frame tradition” of illusionistic images held at a reserve from real space. Yet the essay suggests that this terminus had proved a springboard of another sort, enabling the emergence of a new tendency—Estenger calls it “critical abstract painting”—that fully embraced literalness.

Two considerations were of particular importance: “the painting support and the relationship of that support to the wall.” Critical abstract painting did not seek to absorb the beholder in an encompassing visual field, as the outsize formats of abstract expressionist or color field painting had so often appeared to do. But neither did it assent to the widespread assumption that minimalism had rendered the medium obsolete. Rather, it sought a new “object- ness” for painting, often deploying unconventional industrial materials for the substrate and in many cases laying bare the banal hardware used to affix the artwork to the wall. (Ryman, unsurprisingly, is credited as the innovator of the latter tendency.) Calling attention to the material processes of the painting’s manufacture and display, critical abstract painting underscored that object’s emplacement in real space and time.

Included in After Reinhardt was a painting from Estenger’s first major body of work in New York, the See-Through Paintings, which he produced between 1990 and 1992. Now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Red See-Through Painting, 1991, is an emblematic instance. A life-size (sixty-by-sixty-inch) square, the rigorously symmetrical structure suggests two horizontal halves of a single chassis, each covered by a tautly stretched thickness of clear vinyl, prised apart to make space for two small, block-like canvases painted in the title color and pushed to the lateral peripheries. Miniature monochromes, the twinned red surfaces nod to a dominant tendency in reductive abstraction. Far from appearing as stand-alone gestures at the end of painting, however, these monochromes are but parts in a more complex whole. Bookending the horizontal void at the heart of the painting, they dramatize the act of “seeing through” to the wall on which the work depends. That act is both restaged and complicated by the upper and lower registers, where the shiny vinyl simultaneously reveals the underlying stretcher and reflects the ambient light—a double operation evident in a photograph on the artist’s website, showing Red See-Through Painting at an oblique angle, struck by the shifting illumination through a nearby window

Acknowledging the continued fecundity of this early group for Estenger’s current work, the installation at Pazo Fine Art included Blue See-Through Painting, 1992, a slightly later and even larger iteration measuring eighty inches square. And indeed, each of the recent paintings also contains at least one panel composed of a transparent vinylcovered wooden stretcher (By contrast, a handful of works notably lack stainless steel panels, suggesting the latter remain a more discretionary element.) One might nonetheless observe two key changes. First, the stretchers have shrunken and narrowed, becoming predominantly linear elements. Second, none of the stretchers is fully revealed. On the contrary, as in Blue, 2020, the overlying vinyl is always at least partly obscured by paint Where the SeeThrough Paintings promise transparency, the new work offers a more complicated visual weave of overlying and undergirding elements.

This plays out differently from one construction to the next, but certain effects recur In those paintings with narrow bands of raw canvas—Blue and its direct descendants the revealed bars of the stretcher consistently run perpendicular to, and visibly beneath, the nonpainted bands that expose them, yielding the impression of intersecting and overlapping axes in different spatial planes. Yellow, 2022, evinces a particular twist: There, Estenger has “completed” the nonpainted band bisecting the painted field by introducing an additional wooden segment into the inset stretcher The vertical band appears now over (in the case of the raw canvas), now under (in the case of the wooden segment) either atop or beneath the horizontal bounds of the stretcher running the width of the work but revealed only at its center

Black, 2023 In the painting’s lower right, an exposed band of steel registers, paradoxically, as crossing atop the raw canvas immediately above and below it (and, of course, literally flush with it), only to pass beneath the vertical black bands to either side, both in appearance and in fact Surfacing and submerging anew, the steel band suggests a grid braided in three dimensions. In the painting’s upper half, meanwhile, a revealed length of the stretcher subtending the second panel traverses the same band of exposed canvas; two evenly spaced additional wooden segments set up another play of fully material horizontal and vertical axes just below the surface of that stripe in real space. (And this is to say nothing of the shadow drawing thrown by those elements on the wall behind: a fugitive third lattice.) Together, these carefully calibrated effects invest Black with a sculptural thickness previously denied painting by the high modernist emphasis on sheer opticality—even as they retain and in fact exploit a degree of painterly illusionism inherent in the visual push-pull of contrasting colors and surface textures.

Molly Warnock, May 2023

Then there is the tendency of the stainless steel panels to alternately recede or advance in perception relative both to the painted color and the nonpainted canvas. Consider