Cleve Gray: Silver and Gold

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Silver Song, 1967 Acrylic on canvas with aluminum paint and bronze 101 x 80 inches

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Silver Voyage, 1967 Acrylic on canvas with silver enamel 79 x 80 inches

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Silver Diver, 1967 Acrylic on canvas with aluminum paint 82 x 80 inches

Ja n ua r y 1 2 – F eb rua r y 2 5 2 0 1 2

L OR E TTA HO WA RD GA LLERY

CLEVE GRAY

CLE VE G R AY

Cleve Gray who, among America’s generation of post-War artists, had as consuming a devotion to abstraction as any other painter, worked in series.

In each body of work, he explored an idea in depth, constantly pushing it in unprecedented ways, varying his theme in search of maximum visual richness.

Cleve’s series generally go in one of two directions: they either become progressively looser and freer, revealing his prevailing desire to let go of the reins, or they grow simpler and more minimal and reduced.

The developments within the Ceres paintings fit clearly in the former category. I had the good fortune to look at these with him; as we were standing in one of his art storage buildings at his house in Connecticut, Cleve explained, “ I got tired of the vertical form always on its own. I was trying to make it increasingly loose, increasingly explosive.”

That explosion is especially evident in Silver Diver.

Cleve’s sense of freedom, his deliberate release resonates from this highly charged canvas. “ I was mad at the painting.” He said. “ It was boring. I thought I should do something untoward and without the rational guidance of my paintbrush. I had nothing to lose, and I wondered what would happen; I picked up a bucket of aluminum paint and threw it at the canvas lying on the floor. I watched fascinated as the silver spread under its own momentum across the canvas. That wondering guides all my paintings.”

Cleve recalled that he may have had the aluminum paint around for painting a tennis court fence. This kind of coincidence appealed to him, as deliberate as he was, he believed in the power of accidents and of chance occurrence and in the I-Ching. “I continued to use the aluminum paint in the Ceres series, but later I used a compressor to make the splashes, and those shifts in the silver fascinated me even more,” He went on to explain. “I was trying to express an ambiguity between the white and gray and silver.”

Looking at this painting, I initially found it is one of those works that takes a while to absorb; we have to let it sink in. But eventually it acquires tremendous richness and poetry, for Cleve’s dedication to the making of art, his responsiveness to the materials, the intoxication with color he had had ever since he was a child and his personal language led him to create works that offer us riveting, uplifting experiences.

Nicholas Fox Weber

A B O V E A N D D E TA I L L E F T

FA R R I G H T A N D D E TA I L R I G H T

Ceres 18, 1967 Acrylic on canvas with silver enamel 82 x 80 inches

Silver Ceres, 1967 Acrylic on canvas with aluminum paint 82 x 80 inches Signed, titled and dated