Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs! Stop your highbrow chatter about the latest conceptual trends and come behold the work of a true architect of colors. Stanley Whitney, this artist who had the audacity to believe in painting when everyone declared it dead, reminds us forcefully that abstraction has not finished surprising us.
I have been observing this singular painter for years, who waited until he was fifty to find his visual signature. Fifty years! In our era obsessed with youth and immediate success, Whitney offers us a masterclass in patience and perseverance. It took all this time for him to arrive at this characteristic grid, these stacked rectangles of color like the stones of a chromatic cathedral.
Don’t be mistaken, his approach is anything but a mere mechanical repetition. Each canvas is a battle, an exploration of the infinite possibilities offered by color. Whitney works like a Renaissance mason, laying his blocks of pigment one by one, from left to right, from top to bottom. But where the mason seeks stability, Whitney cultivates subtle imbalance, the quiver, the controlled instability that brings his compositions to life.
His practice reminds me of Edmund Husserl and his phenomenology. Like the German philosopher who sought to return “to the things themselves,” Whitney goes to the essence of color, stripping it of all narrative to keep only its pure presence, its being-there. Each rectangle of color becomes a phenomenon in itself, a direct manifestation of visual experience.
There is something profoundly democratic in his way of organizing pictorial space. No color really dominates, each exists in a relationship of equality with its neighbors. It’s as if Whitney created an ideal society where each individual would have their place, without hierarchy, without oppression. A chromatic utopia, so to speak.
His creative process is fascinating. He always paints while listening to “Bitches Brew” by Miles Davis. This complex music, this experimental jazz-rock fusion, echoes in his compositions where colors clash and converse like the instruments in Davis’s album. The structure is there, but it remains flexible, organic, alive.
Look closely at “Dance the Orange” from 2013. The vibrating oranges clash with deep blues, creating an electric tension that runs through the entire canvas. The horizontals separating the rows are never perfectly straight; they undulate slightly as if they are breathing. Whitney does not seek geometric perfection; he prefers the imperfection that makes the material vibrate.
Husserlian phenomenology teaches us that our perception of the world is always intentional, directed towards the objects of our consciousness. Whitney’s paintings work exactly like that: they guide our gaze, but without ever imprisoning it. The eye moves freely from one block of color to another, constantly discovering new relationships, new chromatic dialogues.
Whitney has never allowed himself to be trapped in the expectations of the art world. When black artists were expected to produce openly political art in the 60s, he chose abstraction. When painting was declared dead in the 70s, he continued to paint. This stubbornness was not obstinacy, but a deep conviction that there were still territories to explore in this ancient medium.
His work is a meditation on time. The time it takes to find one’s way, the time necessary to tame color, the time for contemplation needed to really see his works. In our age of instantaneity and fast consumption of art, Whitney invites us to slow down, to take the time to really look.
The influences of Italian architecture are evident in his work, especially since his stay in Rome in the 90s. The stacked blocks of color evoke the stones of the Colosseum, the facades of Renaissance palaces. But Whitney does not engage in literal citation. He absorbs these influences and transforms them into something deeply contemporary and personal.
There is an almost metaphysical dimension in his way of treating space. Like Husserl, who sought to understand the fundamental structure of consciousness, Whitney explores the fundamental structure of color and pictorial space. His canvases are not windows onto an imaginary world but objects that fully exist in our world, which modify our perception of space.
Whitney loves to cite Mondrian as a major influence, but where the Dutch master sought a form of spiritual transcendence through pure geometry, Whitney remains firmly rooted in the material world. His colors are sensual, physical, almost tactile. You can feel the hand that laid the paint, the hesitations, the corrections, the decisions.
What interests me about Whitney is that he creates works that are both rigorously structured and profoundly intuitive. Each canvas is the result of a process of conscious decisions – where to place each block of color – but also of a form of jazz improvisation where one color calls for another in a continuous flow of creativity.
His palette is extraordinarily varied. He uses both bright primary colors and more subtle tones, colored grays, nuances that defy description. Each color is treated with the same respect, the same attention. There is no hierarchy in his chromatic universe, no noble colors and vulgar colors.
The titles of his recent works reveal a sharp political awareness. “Always Running from the Police – NYC 2020” or his series “No to Prison Life” show that abstraction can carry a message without becoming illustrative or didactic. It is a form of silent but powerful resistance.
Whitney reminds us that painting is not dead, that it has never been more alive. In a world saturated with digital images, his canvases affirm the necessity of direct, physical experience of art. They demand our presence, our attention, our time. Phenomenology teaches us that our perception of the world is always embodied, rooted in our bodies. Whitney’s paintings are deeply embodied too. They carry the traces of the body that created them, of the gestures that brought them to life. They invite us to an experience that is not only visual but fully sensory.
His late success – he really only began to be recognized after he turned sixty – is a lesson in humility for the art world. He reminds us that true artists do not work for success but out of inner necessity, that authentic creation takes time, patience, and perseverance.
Here is an artist who has managed to stay true to his vision while evolving constantly. Each new canvas is an exploration, an adventure into the infinite territory of color. Whitney shows us that it is possible to work with strict constraints – the grid, the rectangles – while maintaining total freedom of invention.
I look at his works and think of what Husserl called the epoché, this parenthetical suspension of the world to better grasp its essence. Whitney puts aside everything that is not essential to painting to reach something fundamental: the pure relationship between color and space.
His canvases are spaces of freedom where color can be fully itself, without having to represent or symbolize anything else. Perhaps that is, ultimately, Whitney’s great lesson: freedom does not come from the absence of constraints but from the way one inhabits these constraints, how one makes them one’s own.
So yes, you bunch of snobs, look closely at these paintings. Take the time to really see them, to let them work on you. Whitney offers us something rare: an art that does not seek to impress us but to make us see the world differently, to make us feel the pure presence of color and space. An art that reminds us that beauty is not in what we see but in the way we see.
