Artworks

One sunny afternoon in Raquel Rabinovich’s home upstate we moved to a part of the studio she hadn’t shown me before. Having already made several visits at this point I had earned her trust to move beyond looking just at the recent works that populated her easels and tables, to an adjacent room with racks, the contents of which surveyed the span of her seven-decade career. We went back in time as she pulled out selections from her past. There was lots to look at, much of it surprising, especially based on my experience with her more recent works: reticent but elegant monochromes with embedded text, and delicate paper scrolls pigmented with soil from rivers around the world. The most exciting work we looked at that afternoon was her Dimension Five series from the 1970s. The geometric forms snaking through a monochrome field spoke to a different set of concerns. Here was a set of optical effects that were rigorous as well as playful. It was this group of works that Jasper Johns saw in 1970 at Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, New York, which initiated their friendship. We can imagine he was drawn, as I was, to these work’s lush, dense surfaces. These paintings are also compelling because their inscrutable yet fulsome monotone fields contain the germ of some of the concerns of the later works. But they allow us an atmospheric pictorial space in which to move that feels exuberant, which Raquel no doubt felt in the 1970s when she painted these works.

— Alex Bacon