Rebecca Michaelis has clearly made two-dimensionality her choice, yet she works with spatial relationships in her purely abstract paintings. She layers pattern over pattern, into which the viewer’s eyes penetrate ever more deeply in an attempt to reconstruct their evolution. At the same time, the viewer tries to get at them with logic, to analyze the system of geometrical structures and color relationships – for which there are, however, no rules, since Michaelis regularly incorporates intentional errors. The zigzag construction, the all-over diamond pattern, the overlapping circles have been applied both intuitively and with precision. The artist also employs an array of techniques with varying haptic qualities: Here the underdrawing is clearly visible, becoming a through line; there it is heavily painted over; here the structure of rough brushstrokes is legible; there the surface is smoothly sealed. Intellectual and sensory pleasure combine in Michaelis’s images, as her titles make clear. These utterly erratic descriptors, which come from the artist’s reading, open up an associative space that no meaning can possibly fill. In her painting, Michaelis confidently takes up the legacy of modernism, of classical abstract art, and actually finds a new way of formulating it, developing a brightly colored new version of the Neo-Geo painting of the 1980s that is both rational and anarchic at the same time.

I

Of course it’s a little silly to be jealous of animals. But for anyone who’s even slightly familiar with Rebecca Michaelis’s pictures¹, who still recalls the first encounter with them, that singular feeling of being overwhelmed will not have been forgotten. There’s no question that flies are unable to take part in the conversation of art. But sometimes it would be awfully nice to be armed with their faceted eyes. With a sufficient supply of visual receptors, of ommatidia, how elegantly one could adapt to Michaelis’s sometimes graphic and sometimes (as is often noticed only on the second human glance) gestural fields of imagery.
As if the total and unmediated gaze enabled by a fly’s eye would cause the image to instantly resolve, a result the human eye could deliver only later and with difficulty through the work of reconstruction. As if human slowness were a disadvantage to be combated through optical optimization, allowing the initial barrage to be transformed into the final statement of a perfectly analogous relational matrix.

The first encounter is followed by a second, a third, and slowly the gaze seems to unclench; the viewer now wonders whether he is dealing with artfully layered mosaics, or whether the artist takes a fiendish delight in putting together a puzzle that the rest of us could achieve only by making brutal cuts through the canvas or paper. Because there’s no place for our gaze to pause for any length of time. We go reeling, even now, from one element of the image to the next; we take another step back to filter out coherent fragments that turn out a moment later to be more illusions directing the gaze to what we thought was an underlying secret pattern. Or we imagine we’ve glimpsed various depth zones to which the individual segments would seem to relate, where they would ultimately form a whole after all.
Most likely we just don’t want to face the fact that when it comes to Michaelis’s images, we are dealing with abstract art. And that we won’t succeed in penetrating her enigmatic pictorial space, even though it seems to be seductively encouraging us to do just that. As though the supposed obstacles could be cleared out of the way; as though maybe everything would go back to its place if we just gave it a good shake. We still believe we can get a single inch closer to those things outside, as if we were violently forcing our way out of a railway car. (“Standing with your left foot on the grooved brass sill, you try in vain with your right shoulder to push the sliding door a little wider open.”)²

II

And suddenly we realize that our searchlights have settled down and a strange equilibrium is beginning to take hold. In what feels like the middle of the room, our vision meets the gaze of the image, which has taken on an air of cool superiority in the meantime. Our initial haste, our desire to drive out the unvarying presentness of the picture, has been forgotten. A game begins that one would hardly have thought possible in art anymore: that the players, viewer and viewed, remain suspended, thereby testifying to something like mutual respect. A respect arising from an intense starting situation that resembles a duel, though of course there is no provocation in it; it originates, rather, in the presumed invitation of an extreme visual experience. And this leads back to a tremendous reassurance, of which one might say that now nothing else can possibly happen. Not that anything has been immobilized. It’s just that something has emerged that feels like an expansion of our other reference values. An increasing stimulation, an enhanced attentiveness, that proposes to become the sounding board for the next encounter. And with something close to fright we realize that this seemingly timeless calm is due to a very specific situation that is certainly not capable of assuming responsibility or liability for what exactly will happen when the spell is broken and that same sort of helplessness we had been hoping to ward off with this exercise sets in again.

I + II

Yes, we’re just at an exhibition. We’re looking at pictures and studying them closely. But if we haven’t had the sensation at least once of being put on display ourselves, before the pictures and for them, then we haven’t seen anything

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1. I’m thinking of images such as Tarabas (2007), Akira (2008), Estagua (2008), Googleplex (2007) and Destinat (2007).
2. Michel Butor, A Change of Heart, trans. Jean Stewart (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959).

The organizing structure of the grid has been a strategy used in pictorial composition for nearly a century. Those early inventions of Picasso and Braque’s ‘cubist grid’ highly influenced Mondrian’s pure grid system. Mondrian’s path was analytical and methodical developing a slow progression between the Dutch seascape to an absolute planarity and linearity of the grid. With inventions such as Composition 10 in Black and White, 1915 and Composition in line, 1916/17 we see the clarity of form and idea in his reduced vocabulary, black vertical and horizontal broken lines extending to the edges within an oval format. In 1918 a series of paintings entitled Composition with grid became the first use of a pure grid system from edge to edge. In 1919 we are given the final two paintings of this series Checkerboard Composition with Dark Colours and Checkerboard Composition with Light Colours. Here the support is in the traditional rectangular format and the grid stretches across the entirety of the surface. However, each plane of the ‘checkerboard’ is painted in an irregular pattern alternating between three colors (orange, red & blue) in the darker picture and six colors (white, light gray, medium gray, yellow, red & blue) in the lighter picture. In 1920 Mondrian paints his first ‘classic’ picture retreating from the assault on defining the limitations of abstraction. These 10 years of experimentation were a fertile model. Mondrian struggled to develop an idiom that has since changed painting. Here is where I see Rebecca Michaelis’ work. She has worked in the manner of Monochrome and Reductivist Abstraction for quite some time before she came into her own. In her recent work we see a major assault on the values that were set up by Mondrian which continued through the 20th Century. The grid becomes less the subject of the painting rather it functions as an armature to get a painting. In studio discussions, I have heard Rebecca repeatedly say, “It’s not about the grid.” You see it’s not singular, it’s not about one aspect, it’s about many and the grid is only part of it. I don’t believe Ms. Michaelis is being flippant, I believe she is being quite serious. When one works with in an idiom for so long the language becomes a part of you. It becomes personal. She uses the grid as a structuring device that provides an equal consistent ‘all-over’ surface. In this way it is functional. It solves the problem of space and composition. There is a sense of flatness that continues from edge to edge. She utilizes the regular repetition of the grid in Destinat, 2007 and in Mladen, 2008 as well in Hailsham, 2007 but here the grid is overlapping. In Googelplex, 2007 there is an ‘all-over’ modified circular grid, in that the negative space of the grid is more present. In Tarabas, 2007 and particularly in Darlington Hall, 2007 the ‘all-overness’ that the grid provides is nearly gone. It is a thing felt not seen or nailed down. The space escapes the rigidity of ‘all-overness’ and becomes more pictorial. Illusion creeps in by irregularly alternating the linear and planar aspects of the module units within the grid. However, there are always vestiges of the superstructure of the underlying grid. This development is monumental. Michaelis maintains the objective physicality and sense of flatness of Modernism but pairs it against its opposite, illusion and pictorial composition, within the same pictorial field. There is also an urge towards the illogical. Throughout these paintings we see erasure, ruin, and mutilation. A structure is developed then knocked down. Something rises to importance, then erased away into the field. Through this process the surfaces become mutilated. The choices of the artist are present yet not present. There is a psychological distress on the viewer. The complexity of the field becomes too much. The sense of wholeness breaks down to a durational experience and moments string you along into a narrative, which negates the ‘all at once’ tenet of Abstraction.