Street Rothkos.

Street Rothkos.
Via Hrag Vartanian: http://bit.ly/3HhbwB

These photos are accumulations of paint, either from construction or buffing (covering over) graffiti, that have taken on the delicacy and color layering of Rothko paintings. They also bring to mind a handful of other abstract expressionists and action painters, Clifford Still, Cy Twombly at times.

The colors are obviously beautiful on these, the light of the street combined with the flat colors of paint mix to something transcendent. The shapes of the paint strokes too have this kind of vernacular poetry that might not have been intentional, but comes out with a kind of energy and directness that's rare even in the work of talented artists.

Here's my own contribution, from Beijing:


I walked by that almost daily for the three weeks I was there last, and the sheer immediacy of the paint was pretty shocking. There are these six stripes on the wall, obviously covering up some lines of writing, but they're placed in such a way that they control this entire stretch of blank white wall. The drips and splatters are classic action/abstract expressionist and the red top and bottom sections remind me of Barnett Newman. Cool stuff. Compare to Vir Heroicus Sublimis, the great MoMA Newman masterpiece:

via Artnet

It also reminds me of the Japanese action painting movement Gutai. A lot of their work was based on gesture: bursting through a sheet of paper, using hands, feet, heads to move paint around on canvas.