Never finished

Ventured out today to a gallery! (It was combined with another stint at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen and Food Pantry.) The show was called "Never Finished" and brought together works by Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi. It's a curious juxtaposition but not without interest. I actually overheard the curator give someone reasons for pairing them, and he gave so many that they started to feel contrived. Most interesting, for me, is the way both artists play with - invite play with - two and three dimensions, all, needless to say, rendered conspicuously in just two. A Morandi show was one of the highlights of my year in Paris (twenty years ago!) - and since then I've felt I was encountering the dearest of old relations whenever I happen on even one of his canvases in a museum. This time was a little different, because of the cold vast spaces of the gallery, but probably also because of the intervening Albers, not (yet) one of my faves.

It did make one more attentive to color (so many otherwise unbeautiful colors suddenly beautiful), and to the materiality of paint and its application... and the somewhat confused awe at the artist's single-minded dedication to his project was already in place. But what thrilled me, as ever, was the mystery in the spaces - neither two- nor three-dimensional - in the backs of Morandi's compositions, a depth conveyable only, paradoxically but sublimely, in his two dimensions.