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A Fine Lightness
John Haberin New York City
Al Loving
Paper thin
Al Loving had a light touch. Not that he shied away from deep colors, but brighter curves cross them like particle tracks close to the speed of light. An entire assemblage is in constant motion at that. Arcs and strips of varying width run wild, spinning or jutting outward with little care for their neighbors. But then work from 1978 and 1979, really is light, even on the tremendous scale of a wall. It is, after all, made of paper. 
A fine lightness is even more vivid in reproduction, where the painted fields let in white from the page or screen. In the gallery, though, the work gathers weight, as things tend to do in real life. It has the shape of Exotic Birds, aluminum reliefs by Frank Stella from precisely the same years. It has their metallic sheen, too, as paint darkens, accumulates, and reflects the light. It recalls Stella's weighty experiments, going back to shaped canvas, in another way as well, for these are not just works on paper. They are works of paper, and the irregular outlines of the materials are the work.
Unstretched canvas from the early 1970s has the same play of lightness against weight, much as for Sam Gilliam and Richard Tuttle. The fabric hangs down of its own accord, stained with parallel bars. The paper includes grids, too, set at an angle as if seen in perspective. It takes on that much more vibrancy and substance by seeming to come off the wall. Geometry also helps hold the work together, as does the tendency of shapes and colors to collide and merge. Tall, narrow paper constructions approach welded steel from another African American, Melvin Edwards.
Alvin D. Loving, Jr., might have had his own memories of flame cutting through metal. He was born in Detroit, in 1935, although his father taught school and then college rather than worked the assembly line. He studied at the University of Illinois and then the University of Michigan, where the elder Loving served as dean. Geometric abstraction came naturally to him, too, just as to another black artist in Stanley Whitney. Paintings from the early 1970s have the pale yellows, hard edges, and diagonals of Stella from those years as well. They just happen to look like cubes edge-on.
People too often overlook Loving's engagement with his time. Like many black artists, he had to put up with life on the margins almost to his death in 2005. He had a reputation as an Abstract Expressionist after painting had moved on. His very choice of materials helped mark him as a lightweight, as did his sense of irony. He did not stick to the sobriety and rule-based structures of Minimalism, but neither did he have the organic form of Post-Minimalism for Eve Hesse and others. Yet he has their tactile presence, and he called the unstretched canvas Self-Portraits.
Were they portraits of blackness? Not particularly, although they do resemble blankets out of any number of cultural traditions. They also look newly contemporary. Thanks to feminism and art-world fashion, a Neo-Minimalism on fabric keeps coming—as just the past month from Elena del Rivero, Martha Clippinger, Brent Wadden, and Lissy Funk. Loving's unstretched canvas and paper, though, tell only part of the story of a painter with real weight. More of his past is still to come.
Adam Winner ran at Josée Bienvenu through July 11, 2015, Al Loving at Garth Greenan through June 27, Elena del Rivero at Josée Bienvenu through May 23, Martha Clippinger at Hionas through May 30, Brent Wadden at Mitchell-Innes & Nash through May 30, and Lissy Funk at JTT through June 21.