MORRISTOWN, New Jersey — When the Italian painter Paolo Ucello had reached old age, disappointed with his career, he went into seclusion to devote himself entirely to what he called his “sweet mistress”: perspective drawing. Its use transformed Western art, magicking the simple materials of paintings into virtual realities limited only by the human imagination. With it, painting became one of the most successful cultural products of the European Renaissance, sustaining centuries of interest in the objects and a continuous tradition of practice.
In the exhibition Set in Motion: Kinetic Worlds from the Studio of Richard Whitten at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey, the Rhode Island-based artist grapples with and extends this legacy. Through canny juxtaposition of red and blue or green, deft illusionistic shadows, and perspectival sleight of hand, the images seem to erupt from the surface, while meticulously shaped panels conspire with intricately depicted architectural frameworks to make viewers question whether these paintings are indeed entirely flat. (They are.)
Handsomely installed across several airy rooms, the exhibition is divided into four sections: Inspiration, Imagination, Exploration, and Innovation. The first opens the show by highlighting the contrast between illusion of depth and the flatness of the surface through the use of Eastern decorative motifs. In “Jongleur” (2005), for instance, the primary decorative surface is patterned with arches that evoke Islamic muqarnas vaults as well as Christian trefoils, while in “Anima” (2020), geometric multicolor tiles adorn the archway and its domed roof.
A more striking convergence of East and West is “Square Earth” (2017), a circular panel with a smaller circle emerging from its rim, like the diagram of an orbiting planet. Inside a reddish decorative border, an abyss opens up, a white cube hovering in the center. The geometric precision of the cube and the atemporal vacuum of the painting are counteracted by the signs of age and use on the object’s edges and planes. A red-tipped dowel pierces it, one end pointing into the depth of the painting, the other emerging out toward the viewer. The cube, the artist notes in the wall text, references both the kindergarten blocks developed by Friedrich Froebel, intended to instruct children in the unity of all forms, and the Chinese character for China. Froebel’s dangling cube here materializes and rotates the two-dimensional linguistic symbol in space. This placement makes the form both more present and more elusive for the viewer, while Whitten’s own combined Chinese and Western ancestry find tentative common ground.
The exhibition’s remaining three categories all highlight the fertility of Whitten’s visual imagination, populated with illusions that tease the viewer like a dog that just wants to play. Innovation zeroes in on historic scientific instruments. Whitten has created a notional book on 12 panels, interleaving images of six objects from the collection of the Museo Galileo in Florence with six machines of his own creation. Precise drawings and gorgeous, hand-crafted wooden prototypes of his fictional machines convey the artist’s fascination with their complex, purpose-built engineering.
Nonwestern decorative inspiration notwithstanding, these latter sections reinforce the overwhelming importance of the European tradition of art and science to these paintings, marked also in Whitten’s use of continental languages to name the artworks. Accordingly, the viewing experience remains in thrall to the “sweet mistress.” The eye’s subjection to perspective when submitting to the illusion is allegorized in the eyes and eye surrogates that abound in the paintings. These range from a mask composed of eyeglasses with painted eyes in “Looking Glass” (2016) to the numerous white orbs placed in hemispherical sockets and large (fictive) screw heads that suggest closed eyes. In “Un Coup d’Oeil (A Glimpse)” (2017), the action derives from the literal meaning of the French idiom for “glimpse”: “a blow to the eye.” An orange-striped ball hovers over a spike, forever about to lodge itself there. The discomfort of this possible result is mitigated by the buoyancy and apparent sentience of the ball, which looks as if it could use its socket to turn its one-eyed gaze at us as easily as it could fall upon the spike.
Cheerfully disquieting in their effect and unapologetically erudite, Whitten’s paintings are a unique presence in contemporary art, well displayed in the Morris Museum. Come with your thinking cap on, ready to embrace the illusion.
Set in Motion: Kinetic Worlds from the Studio of Richard Whitten continues at the Morris Museum (6 Normandy Heights Road, Morristown, New Jersey) through September 1. The exhibition was curated by Anne Ricculli, director of Exhibits and Collections, Morris Museum.
