Ring A (Yellow) 2010

Robert Mangold made this Ring A (Yellow), we don't have a date, but, hey, time is a construct, right? He did it with, looks like, graphite and color. That yellow band just vibrates, doesn’t it? It reminds me of what Jasper Johns once said about painting: "Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it." Mangold really takes that to heart. He lays down this smooth, sunny yellow, but then he messes with it, dividing it up, complicating it with those graphite lines. Look at where the yellow stops and the graphite keeps going, just drifting off into space, like a thought trailing off mid-sentence. It’s like he's showing us that a circle doesn’t have to be perfect, that a line can be both there and not there, all at the same time. It gives you the sense that geometry is never truly exact, but somehow always evolving. I'm thinking, if Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly had a baby, it might look something like this. But, you know, that’s just one way of seeing it.