Ronnie Landfield
Recent Works
Findlay Galleries, New York
By Jillian Russo, November 16, 2024
Home from the Hill, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 29 x 47 inches
Ronnie Landfield’s career has spanned nearly six decades, over the course of which he has refined a singular style that combines elements of minimalism, color field painting, and abstract expressionism. A native New Yorker, Landfield’s career began at the center of the post-war art scene in the late 1960s. His artistic circle included Dan Christensen, Peter Young, and Larry Poons, as well as minimalists Eva Hesse, Frank Stella, and Donald Judd and earth artists Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer. He was a regular at Max’s Kansas City, where everyone convened to debate the development of new movements that were redefining American art.
A hallmark of Landfield’s painting is his unexpected combination of minimalist and stain painting techniques. His breakout 1969 painting Diamond Lake, which was purchased by Philip Johnson and acquired by MoMA, pairs a plum-colored hard-edged horizontal band at the bottom of the canvas, with luminous layers of blueberry and eggplant hues which move upward like clouds lifting off a horizon line. His recent works on view at Findlay Galleries feature bands that continue to function as boarders for passages of fluid pigment, but remarkably, his approach to these now iconic elements has evolved. Allusions to topography--presumably to the hills around his home and studio near Storm King Mountain—are more visceral and pronounced. The horizontal bands now function more prominently as frames or viewing platforms that provide entry into jewel-colored vistas.
In a 2020 Artforum review, Ara Osterweil noted that the “bars underscore the environmental consciousness that has ever been present in Landfield’s work” by “dramatizing humankind’s encroachments on even the most pristine landscapes.” In the paintings Call to the Wind and Night of Time, the environmental connections are even more apparent. The compositional structure has subtly been redefined, moving incrementally away from the emphasis on flatness characteristic of post-painterly abstraction. A towering vertical canvas, Call to the Wind features a foundational burnt sienna strip that serves as a perch from which to view a panorama composed of radiant horizontal swathes of sapphire, sunny yellow, umber, and tangerine. Further in the distance, these hues culminate in a soft haze of translucent rainbow tones that forms a mountain-like ridge that defines the top of the canvas. Above, a register of cobalt blue dappled with white lines and specks creates the impression of a twinkling star-filled sky or other natural celestial phenomena. Landfield produces the dappled effect, which also appears in the works Summer Passage and Song in Time, by modifying the speed of paint application and the wetness of his brushes.
In Night of Time, another vertical composition, a striated ribbon of emerald, olive, and canary yellow, cuts across the canvas, evoking an ancient verdant cliff, such as the Palisades that drop into the Hudson River. Here, the burnt-sienna base strip is somewhat narrower, and the eye-catching cliff creates a strong horizon line, producing the illusion of deep space that the viewer can imagine walking into. This structure, employed in Call to the Wind and Night of Time, in which we become the Rückenfigur, evokes Romantic landscape paintings such as Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c. 1817). It is important to note, however, that Landfield’s references to landscape are sensorial and not literal. He is not capturing a view but has internalized the experience of the environment around him after ten years of living and working upstate.
Landfield’s move from Tribeca to the Hudson Valley was prompted by the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy, which damaged many of his paintings and rendered his home and studio unhabitable. Since then, traversing the distance between Manhattan and Cornwall has become a familiar journey, and the horizontal compositions Home Again, Home from the Hill, and The Forward Path seem to reference moving through the landscape. Landfield paints quickly, and these compositions are alive with urgent energy and forward motion as if we are getting glimpses of breath-stopping color and snapshots of timeless terrain as we speed by.
In contrast, other paintings, such as Autumn Morning and Song in Time, retain a greater sense of flatness and quietude. In Autumn Morning, the visible edges of broad brushstrokes encourage us to revel in the artist’s brilliant color combinations and expert handling of medium. Landfield has honed a variety of dramatic painterly effects, such as the delicate bleeds and blends between contrasting color strips in Autumn Morning and the formation of blue streaks that rain down on a field of pink in Song in Time.
Although he manipulates degrees of flatness and depth, the overall cohesiveness of Landfield’s style over decades allows it to resonate across time. The environmental concerns of the late 1960s remain at least as resonate today as we grapple with the effects of climate change that are reshaping the landscape around us. Landfield’s heightened emphasis on connection to the natural world, although refracted into glowing, dreamy vistas, makes his work all the more timely.
Autumn Morning, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 65 inches