David Novros: Reframing the Unframed

Three vertical windows appear to be incased within the landscape frame of Boathouse (2016) of David Novros, a thoroughly spellbinding painting that beckons to modernism’s fascination with flatness, only to circumvent that through the wizardry of laconic illusion stripped bare of semantic specificity. Boathouse concurrently gestures at non-representation and representation so as to do away with their anticipated thresholds. Inciting discursive text, this significantly scaled and composite painting that consists of seven canvas panels readily disseminates such dialectical pairs as painting/relief sculpture, painting/architecture, surface/support, inside/outside, presence/absence, flatness/depth, recession/protrusion, disegno/colorito, intrinsic/extrinsic and among endless many contraries, the ergon (work) and parergon (what is supplementary to the work, that is to say the frame—physical yet pertinaciously contextual as well). “Parerga have a thickness, a surface which separates them not only (as Kant would have it) from the integral inside, from the body proper of the ergon, but also from the outside, from the wall on which the painting is hung,” ruminates Jacques Derrida. “The parergon stands out [se détache] both from the ergon (the work) and from the milieu, it stands out first of all like a figure on a ground.”[1]

Indeed, Boathouse unequivocally dissects the parergon, the frame, by slicing the outermost rectangular form horizontally at the pair of orange marks on each of its vertical sides in order for those two open spaces to serve as conduits that visibly and palpably reconnect the internal and external surfaces of the wall. And yet within the purely optical experience of the viewer, the presence of the wall as a form of empty flatness recurs with a rectangular rhythm produced by the inner panels, where the suggestion of the frame reappears through a certain degree of reference to linear perspective—particularly within the upper left corner of the central panel, where the intersection of the vertical and horizontal ochre bands subliminally produces the apparition of a diagonal line, somewhat of an orthogonal line segment evoking depth. As a phenomenon of coloristic perception, Novros here straightforwardly invites the beholder to consider the effect of the darker and lighter contrast values of the neighboring blues. 

Subsequently, sensation attempts to inform vision of the illusory potentiality of the flat surface through an aesthetics that nonetheless appears to be wholly in tune with Tableau 2 (1922) by Piet Mondrian of the Guggenheim Museum, one of the pivotal paintings of abstraction of the past century. In spite of the pure absence of figuration, this painting of Novros may conjure up compositional, formal and conceptual elements of such a formative painting as Presentation at the Temple (1342) of Ambrogio Lorenzetti at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the architecture depicted within the absorbing Marriage of the Virgin (1500-1504) of Perugino at Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen or the three windows in The Last Supper (1490s) of Leonardo da Vinci at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. The lower and left sides of the window in Albrecht Dürer’s Self Portrait (1498) of the Prado Museum in Madrid are also transitorily suggested within the inner panels of Boathouse—albeit inverted here. As the viewer approaches Boathouse to inspect its materiality, the so-called black, navy, orange, grey, blue, ochre and rust colors offer a sense of fluidity upon the panel edges, as if layers of paint were to announce the painting’s hesitance of absolute, monochromatic flatness—the impression received from a far distance.

The three panels of Phoenix (2018) contain primarily rectangular forms in a range of hues, inviting the observer to reflect upon coloration through such notions as proximity, color weight, space, figure, ground and perhaps most arrestingly luminosity—a phenomenon that is here attached to color theories that continue being investigated and transformed: from Isaac Newton’s color wheel to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s phenomenological Theory of Color to Michel Eugène Chevreul’s statement that “two adjacent colors, when seen by the eye, will appear as dissimilar as possible.”[2] Phoenix of Novros also invites us to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflection on color, one that remains open to Goethe’s subjectivist approach and yet submits it to inexhaustible degrees of complexity. Perhaps it is the discourse surrounding Michel Albert Vanel’s “Planetary” color system of 1983 that lends itself as a viable reading of Phoenix: while there are almost infinitely many possibilities of color combination and perception, “the everyday sensation of color still centers on a few main color groups, and can thus be represented by planets, orbited by numerous small moons. This is a multidimensional color space.”[3] As a shade of white frames groups of rectangular arrangements of various pulsating hues in Phoenix, the painting evokes the constantly shifting scientific and psychological principles of color, as if reframing theories and sensations of color systems—only to unframe them as well.