FOREWORD PERCIVAL EVERETT

I am sitting in my writing studio in Los Angeles. In front of me is George Byrne’s Green Sun with Yellow What am I seeing? Is it an abstract composition? The apparent flatness of the dark blue, like blue and white spaces would suggest so? However, beneath the coral colored rectangle, which is beveled, there is a shadow, a depiction of spatiality so clear that I believe I can see under the coral, perhaps slide my hand beneath it. On the beveled border of the coral rectangle is a green sun, a symbol for the sun, a child’s sun. At once the picture is a photograph and a painting, abstract and representative. At the bottom of the composition is yellow cylinder, shaded on one side and impossibly casting no shadow. Abstraction? The cylinder is immediately recognizable as a parking lot pole barrier, common in most cities, but certainly ubiquitous in Los Angeles and so this work becomes a landscape. The magic of it is that as soon as I see the picture it is exactly that, a portrait of Los Angeles. I know what I see, but I cannot articulate the mechanisms at work here. The shapes are not unique to to Los Angeles. Neither are the colors, though they are distinctly southern Californian. It is an abstract landscape that is its subject.

I am reminded of the later paintings of Piet Mondrian. Not simply because of the suggestion of a grid to represent place, but because the work is actively breaking down the constraints of realism. Green Sun with Yellow is a photograph of a place and, though the image might or might not have been manipulated in some way, it is not a composite of several images or several places. It is, in this way, a landscape, but it has reversed its gaze and so our perspective, from out to in, from far to close and yet it still works as a portrait of a place. Is this the power of abstraction or the immediacy of naturalism?

Instead of following an impulse to eradicate the particular form, the aim of the cubists and Mondrian, Byrne embraces existing forms. In these works, lines and the colors are sharply defined. Things are what they are, awnings are awnings, but sheltering what? Doors are appear without knobs or handles. Traffic barriers have no traffic to deflect. Often, the natural world looms just outside the shapes, as backdrop, as if separate from the composition, while, unquestionably, deliberate and necessary. These are photographs that challenge our ideas of photography. They are paintings of the material world that make us question the necessity of paint.

These photographs offer something new every time I come to them. They have a narrative push that appeals to my writer’s sensibility, but I cannot repeat the images with descriptive language. The colors make this works easy to live with, a pleasure to view, but they offer so many surprises. The painting that appears on the cover of this book draws me in with the shadowless palm tree, but the red triangle on the right border strikes me a genius. It is not that it should not be there, but the feeling that, of course, it should be there. Is the red a part of geometry of the photograph or is it an element of nature like the top of the mountain on the left border? Is the palm tree a thing from nature or is it inserted into our world like the blue post?

These are beautiful, challenging works that offer more with familiarity. They are friends or pets. We not only live with them, but they live with us.

Los Angeles, March 2023