Hermosa Beach

Painted in 1966, the present work, a double concentric square, is a playful extension of Frank Stella's Black Painting series from the late 1950's, in which he approached painting in a highly reductive manner anticipating Minimal Arts' repetitive elements of shape and form, deconstucting the the way we as viewers see the surface of a painting. Stella's maxim, "What you see is what you see", is another take on Warhol's provocative statement: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface, there is nothing behind it." The same idea can be applied to Stella, but rather then playing with how far painting can be assimilated into pop culture or the representation thereof, he chooses to keep the use of the paint itself simple: with no inherent rules or boundaries, no centre or focus, the paint follows the arbitrary boudaries of its canvas shape. In this sensual "colour versus black and white" concentric square diptych, Stella explores yet another way of presenting painting and the canvas outside its "normal" and "rectangular" boundaries in much the same way as in his signature shaped canvases.