La perspectiva esencial: minimalismos en la Colección Helga de Alvear

Everson Museum in Syracuse (1962), or the purity of color of Richard Meier’s Museum für Kunsthandwerk (1985).

The same family atmosphere could be said to exist between Robert Morris’ monoliths and certain of Simon Ungers’ installations. Or between lsozaki’s Gunma City Museum, the “conceptual axonometry” of Tadao Ando’s Koshino house and the structures of Sol LeWitt. Or, lastly, between the latter’s drawings and Pei’s grid for the Louvre pyramid. In fact, both sides are interested in a conceptualization of space as materialized in the constructed work.

In LeWitt’s work architectonic space takes on a relevance that extends beyond the status of mere backdrop, something that Dan Flavin’s work takes to an extreme. For Flavin, although architecture works with space, one’s perception of this space can be altered just as much by light as by some more solid material. This dialectic between space and light can also be observed in the light-filled installations of James Turrell and in Steven Hall’s design for the Shaw & Company Offices.

Likewise, Carl Andre’s work tries to slowly do away with volume, and even its presence in space, in order to become one with it. Components protruding no more than a few millimeters from the floor they sit on respond to a moment at the beginning of the 70s when Andre considered that his first work was too sculptural, too structural, even: it could be said that a similar spirit informs both an installation like Equivalent I-VIII from 1966 and Mies van der Rohe’s IIT plan from 1941. At a certain moment Andre wanted his works to be more like road surfaces than like buildings, as he put it.

Prior to that radical shift towards the absolute minimum —or towards the conceptual— , it is a concern for the structural that furthers direct use of materials in Andre or an interest in removing the skin and revealing the structure in LeWitt. Frank Stella, meanwhile, tries to establish total continuity between the structural and the superficial. For him, the logic of compositional structure is inseparable from the logic of the sign, which is why the paint on the canvas simply follows the shape of the stretcher. In Donald Judd truth to materials is aimed, in the opposite way to those that work using light, at eliminating illusory effects of any kind, so that the represented space is at one with real space. Judd elaborates and reduces his objects until their form coincides with their constituent elements. In this he 107