Cerith Wyn Evans Reimagines Duchamp and Stella
At Marian Goodman, Paris, the artist’s latest works cite leading figures from twentieth-century art
Cerith Wyn Evans is the type of artist whose engagement with the forms and figures of modern art makes his work a joy to look at – especially for those able to untangle its dense web of references. For his most recent exhibition, ‘no realm of thought…’ at Marian Goodman, Paris – one of a two-part exhibition happening concurrently at the gallery in New York – Evans converses with the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Félix Guattari, Frank Stella and David Tudor.
Cerith Wyn Evans, Starstarstar/Steer (transphoton) VI, 2019, metal frame, glass, LED strips, dimmer unit, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery; photograph: Rebecca Fanuele
On the ground floor, the works in the series ‘Neons after Stella’ (2022) buzz with fluorescent white light in the forms of Stella’s ‘Black Paintings’ (1958–60). Although Evans’s citation of the US painter’s most iconic series suggests admiration, his newly created work has a somewhat antagonistic or antithetical relationship to the original: whereas Stella used black paint rhythmed with thin interstices of blank canvas, Evans has employed light to trace the same interstices, consigning the rest to literal negative space. By shaping his thoroughly abstract canvases, Stella made intentionally ambiguous painting-objects. Evans, however, has removed his iterations from the wall and suspended them in the centre of the gallery, effectively eliminating any ambiguity as to their three dimensionality. All of a sudden, Stella’s non-objective, non-referential, relatively silent works, which Evans describes on the gallery’s website as ‘occasioning a bridge to nothingness’, are made to speak through his imaginative détourning of their various constitutive parts.
