Ostensibly, the work of Meno Eytan belongs to the lineage of the post-painterly abstraction and hard-edge painting of the 1960s and ’70s. Emergent from the tail end of the chasmic abstract expressionist movement, they shared many formal elements with the concurrent advent of minimalism. By virtue, Eytan’s work continues the hard-edge tradition of painters such as Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt, Lorser Feitelson, Karl Benjamin and Larry Zox. The movement was a particular evolution of colour field painting, which had developed concomitantly with abstract expressionism in the 1950s and ’60s. Artists Kenneth Noland, Paul Reed, William Perehudoff, Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler made experiments with early acrylic paints and flat areas of stained colour, defined by hard edges. Others adopted methods like using an air gun — Jules Olitski, Dan Christensen — to disperse colour, or folding and dyeing the canvas — Sam Gilliam — to explore new possibilities. All amounted to shedding AbEx’s painterly and expressive tendencies, ushering in an increasingly process-based mode of work. Alongside minimalism, whose idea of ‘primary structures’ shared a common core with colour field’s ‘all-over’ principle. This would extend to conceptualism and many other subsequent forms of art in the second half of the 20th century.
Hard-edge painting’s geometric forms and internal colour relations expanded upon precedents set by early 20th century modernist movements such as De Stijl (aka Neoplasticism), its closely related contingents Abstraction-Création and Concrete Art and Russian Suprematism. These were the same European movements that minimalism had claimed its heritage from — all of which, significantly, also espoused an architectural tenet. Those same roots had borne the American abstract art of the decades prior to hard-edge, transposed to America by early antecedents and educators. Many of whom — Josef Albers, Hans Hoffmann, among others — had themselves emigrated from Europe, where they had been inspired, or even educated, by the Bauhaus, or figures like Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. They were influential — integral even — to the birth of abstract expressionism, of whose members a good deal from Europe subsequently followed.
The impact of the hard-edge mode is lasting. Its legacy is still palpable in the currents of contemporary painting today, continually being reinvented and revisited for its plasticity and inherent, boundless potential to yield new images and forms. Eytan intelligently exploits that plasticity which was so fundamental of 20th century modernity — right up to the late modernism of the hard-edge painters — assimilating its particular energy and ethos into his paintings. In his paintings, we find its tradition very much alive — full of new life and ideas, while still at its roots re-engaging the seminal aesthetic and art-historical innovations of that moment. Meno Eytan’s rigorous and prolific practice is testament to the adaptability of such a mode of image-making. He consistently absorbs new devices so as to continue questioning the nature of the picture plane — its edges and containment — singularity or multiplicity. These elements always feel as though they are being shifted, re-navigated and redefined in Eytan’s work, with a characteristic freedom and generosity of spirit.
Eytan’s work emanates a quality of endless rediscovery, and seems to point in many directions at once. Where shifting horizons of perception take us on a circuitous path of newly triggered reference points and associations, while touching on many of the post-modern facets of painting which have developed since hard-edge’s zenith. On some viewings the works seem positively (in)animate. Suggesting some kind of assortment of objects arranged and stacked beside each other, they evoke the post-cubist, Purist work of Amédée Ozenfant. Purism — especially Ozenfant’s — was already, to a degree, an abstract transmutation of the quiet and methodically composed animate–inanimate still lives of Morandi. In this way, we can see Eytan’s oeuvre as a gateway to the hard-edge style’s inherent cubist roots — a portal to those natal cubic transmutations of figures and still lives.
The sheer complexity and detail of some of the works even induces a kind of self-referentiality, whereby the picture plane begins to appear as if it were made up of pictures within pictures. Sometimes elongated into a vertical stack — of what we might analogously refer to as ‘paintings’ (or images) — within the painting, sometimes a tight grid. As though ideas have been gathered in thumbnail format to configure the component parts of one — whole — picture. This kind of ‘stacked’, hybrid, cumulative–composite element — cognizant of still life’s nestled forms — recalls certain post-modern interventions in painting ventured by artists such as Richard Jackson. Jackson created installations comprising the vast production of painted canvases, stacked one-against-another — backs facing toward the viewer — so that only their paint-splattered and splodged sides remained visible. Thereby creating a finished work whose sum is that of many, partially concealed and constituent parts. This engenders a different logic of image-making and way of considering paintings, something of which can be recognised in the work of Eytan. It corresponds too, to the teetering stacks and assemblages of Imi Knoebel. Knoebel feverishly layers the picture support with brightly painted, manifold slats, strips and panels of wood or aluminium. Thus forming an optically and spatially charged, multi-dimensional object that echoes the fragmented and illusory pictorial tricks of Eytan’s two-dimensional surfaces. Knoebel’s connection to the modernist plastic tradition is directly traceable.
Eytan keeps his sprawling and multi-layered ideas within the singular picture plane. His paintings stay loyal to the binary of the square vs. rectangular canvas support, unlike those hard-edge painters who pushed the rhythms of their abstract designs into shaped canvases. Such as — aside from those of the aforementioned Stella, Kelly, Noland and Reed — the paintings of Leon Polk Smith, Jeremy Moon, Neil Williams and Al Loving. Michael Fried famously claimed shaped supports could ‘merely prolong the agony’ (Art and Objecthood, 1967) of late modernist painting’s endgame — which the trend’s precarious brinkmanship at the — literal — extremities of the canvas–as–picture–plane had precipitated. Some even extended their designs beyond the canvas totally, onto the wall or into the environment, such as Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Niele Toroni et al.
Despite their resolute rectilinearity, Eytan’s paintings produce the illusion of absolute multiplicity. The interior multiplications, duplications and variations hint towards just as much an idea of what isn’t there, as what is (what we could term portality). That is, the presence of multiple ideas that might exist beyond the canvas’ singular picture plane, whose forms are otherwise obscured. Squashed, squeezed, folded, stretched, wedged together, combined and hybridised — in the plethoric grid of images that we are privy to in the end picture. Upon viewing only the sides of a stack of paintings — those pictures within pictures — by Jackson or Knoebel we may wonder, beyond what we can see, what their hidden faces might look like. Likewise, Eytan’s works, in their multifarious abundance, gesture towards images and ideas in dimensions beyond their four-sided-canvas confines. Bristling to the edge with energy, they can barely contain themselves — pointing simultaneously to a million other ideas beyond their periphery. If we could only delve inside that painting and pull — or slide — just one of those ‘ideas’ out — rotate, un-stretch and un-flatten one of those elongated columns, or re-expand those thumbnails — we might be able to see it in its decompressed whole. Instead, we move onto another painting, continuing the seamless universe of his oeuvre.
The delicate and elaborately raised textures of Eytan’s surfaces — imperceptible in reproductions — bring to mind the paintings of Peter Halley. A key example of another painter who has followed in the aesthetic lineage of late modernist hard-edge painting, yet evolved and expanded its syntax and semantics. He assimilates references as eclectic as conduit, circuit boards and jail cells into his formal language. The square forms with which he builds his compositions often alternate between smooth and staccato textures via his use of Roll-A-Tex, a household paint additive. Using his favoured medium of acrylic on linen, Eytan uses texture to delineate a finely raised, maze-like form. Strikingly though — and unlike Halley’s use of texture — Eytan’s raised areas of form often do not correspond directly to the pictorial colour forms in the painting. In fact, they run counter to them, sprawling in their own low-relief dimension — another example of the overflowing complexity of form and imagery in his work.
The outright abundance of Meno Eytan’s practice is a natural extension of that multiplicity which we find inside his paintings — their pictures within pictures. Abundant in spirit, volume and character, as well as the openheartedness of the manner in which he chooses to present them. His output is incredibly prolific (he generously maintains an always growing, regularly updated online archive), consistently producing a multitude of paintings in quick succession. The works are fluid, and possess a momentum that seems to flow from one to another. Motifs and ideas resurface — further pushed and explored — sometimes having the appearance of being ‘itemised’ all-together-in-one, in an implicitly meta–fractal manner. Not only does this express itself in the internal pictures, but it also unravels a kind of seriality in the paintings overall. Each acts as a coda to paintings that have come before, so as to create the feeling of a web, or network of paintings — a living body. Eytan organises regular shows to cleanse his — literal and figurative — working space. In these shows, rather than being inwardly and pre-emptively self-abridging, Eytan chooses, outwardly and openly instead, to show the entire body of work, filling the walls in a salon hang-cum-installation.
These devices of seriality and abundance are markedly contemporary, and conjure up the work of Josh Smith — another equally prolific artist. Smith produces painting after painting in long, seamless series. Often producing hundreds of paintings or prints based around the same motif — his signature, palm trees, fish, the grim reaper etc. Similarly, rather than engaging a process of selection and rejection, Smith opts to display his paintings crammed tightly together — almost as if an installation. With as much emphasis on their seriality and interrelationship — or play-off between one another — as on the paintings themselves, he thereby imbues them with a transparency of process. Eytan’s work shares that emphasis on process. As with the abstractionists of the 20th century — AbEx and colour field through to hard-edge — each of his paintings has its own, carefully considered and composed — almost sacred — pictorial and spiritual inner value. They constitute a self-contained, wholly realised picture. Yet, there is nonetheless a dynamic of progression and interrelation between them, supported by Eytan’s decision to show a great number simultaneously. Both artists appear to look first and foremost to their process and instinct to guide them. They allow the intuitive process of painting to lead itself to the next image, forming an ongoing stream of imagery that connects each consecutive painting together in a string. This has long been a strategy of making pictures, throughout the history of painting — particularly since the outset of abstraction, with its plastic capabilities. However, both artists engage in devices that place a distinct emphasis on process — in their finished works, as well as the transparency with which they are installed. The sheer volume of works, and their proximity, elucidates their sequential, interconnected spirit.