Julian and Barbara Stanczak at the Medici Museum in Warren, Ohio

Julian Stanczak is surely the one painter of recognized international stature that Cleveland has produced.  But it’s an unfortunate fact that work has not been very well shown in town.  The Cleveland Museum of Art has never staged an exhibition of his work, and those exhibitions that have been devoted to him—for example, a conscientious four-part survey of his prints at the Kelvin Smith Library of CWRU—have been modest in scale and have not attempted to showcase the grandeur of his achievement.    

Sadly, to see the most important showing of his work in the region to date requires a bit of a trek. Where Light Lives: Visions in Color and Form is on view through July 31 at the Medici Museum, in Warren–about 15 miles from Youngstown.  Not many Clevelanders are up for making a pilgrimage to Warren, and that’s a shame: The exhibition is a stunning revelation, even for those who’ve long been admirers of Stanczak’s work.  For those who take the trouble of the trip, it will surely be one of the great experiences of a lifetime, not unlike a religious pilgrimage.

To reduce Stanczak’s life achievement to a sound bite, he was the figure whose 1964 exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York gave rise to the term ‘Op Art.’  As is often the case, the label was both a boost and a hindrance to full appreciation of his work.  The label grouped his work with dozens of other artists who worked with optically vibrant effects, and it has been most often been represented in exhibitions where just a few paintings by him have been thrown in with those of other artists, as was the case with a widely publicized 1965 show The Responsive Eye, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

What’s been lacking in jumbled displays of this sort is an understanding of the variety, subtlety and intellectual depth of Julian’s work—his ability to create innumerable different variations on a theme in a manner that resembles the genius of a great composer such as Bach.  He’s not just a one-trick pony.  His work is varied and complex, and explores deep issues that hover at the boundary between art, psychology, mathematics, science, ontology and metaphysics.  In a fashion that brings to mind the philosophical musings of Descartes, he explores the interplay between the external world and the internal world of human consciousness. 

The historical origins of Julian’s work can be traced back to the work of the French scientist, Michel Eugene Chevreul, who was the chemist in charge of standardizing the color dyes that were used at The Royal Tapestry factory producing large gobelins, which are large woven wall hangings. When complaints came that some of the colors looked different in different places, Chevreul subjected the matter to scientific study and discovered that the problem was not that the dyes were inconsistent but rather that the dyes appeared different when placed in different color environments. In short, we don’t see things individually as they are, – we actively interpret them in their entire context, as a gestalt.

In fact, under certain circumstances, the eye and mind can make up a color that isn’t there.  A masterful demonstration of this fact is Julian’s painting Filtered Yellow in the Cleveland Museum of Art, which creates the effect of overlapping yellow shapes through the optical vibration of orange-red and light green lines.  Remarkably, there’s no yellow pigment in the painting! The complementary color relationships provoke a third colorant to appear in the mind/perception of the viewer. 

And this is by no means the only optical illusion that creates something that isn’t there.  For example, the vibration of different colors can create a shimmering effect; it can create a glow of light that seems to project forward in front of a painting.  This radiance exists only in our mind’s eye! 

Our practice of making sense of the visual world is, in short, an odd combination of recording what is actually there and of creating patterns of interpretation and organization in our mind.

What’s particularly exciting about the display at the Medici Museum is that the rooms are very large, and this makes it possible to exhibit paintings that are very large, including many that have languished in storage and that have never been exhibited before.  Some are ten feet high, so large that they could not be squeezed through the door of most galleries. 

Their visual impact is impressive.  In paintings of religious subjects, light has long been a signifier of the mysterious and spiritual.  Most paintings of this sort, however, treat pictorial space as a view into the distance, and the light seems to be glowing at some distant point behind the wall on which the paintings hang.  But in Julian’s paintings the light seems to project out from the wall, and when the paintings are very large the glow projects out a good many feet. 

The paintings shimmer in different ways as the viewer moves around them, and they bathe the spectator in light. What is uncanny is that this light provides shape and definition to the room, in a fashion not unlike walls or an actual physical object of some sort, but more mysteriously.  There’s even the feeling that it transforms the setting into something chapel-like, with a mysterious spiritual aura.  While I’ve long been a fan of Julian’s work, this exhibition brings out his genius in a way unlike any I’ve seen before. 

In addition, the exhibition nicely brings out the remarkable range of Julian’s exploration of optical effects and a quality of mood that’s quite different from that of most other practitioners of Op Art. 

Unlike the work of most Op Artists, such as Bridget Riley or Richard Anuszkiewicz, who tend to gravitate to effects that are harsh and garish, Julian’s creations are wonderfully serene. They transform physical substance into something elusive, mysterious and liquid, not dissimilar to effect of the great water-lily paintings of Claude Monet. 

There’s a technical reason for this.  Most of the masters of Op Art stress strong contrasts of light and dark, and colors that clash.  Julian, on the other hand, organized his paintings through colors whose vibrations were as carefully tuned as notes in music.  He often spent days or even weeks developing a scale of colors on a thin strip of plastic, whose notes were in perfect harmony, before touching a brush to the painting he was carefully conceiving in his mind.

And as already indicated, he was not a “one-trick pony,” but did something different in every painting, and often combined several different magic tricks in a single work.  To name a few of these:  he changed colors by adjusting the width of lines or by changing the color of the  background; he created the illusion of colors that actually aren’t there; he explored illusions that make the shapes in a painting seem to fold, or overlap, or wrinkle, or change their position in space. 

In the Medici exhibition an interesting instance of this is his exploration of metallic effects.  In paintings such as Folding Two of 1992 one could swear that he used silver paint for the shimmering geometric lines that run over the background color.  In fact, the effect of silver is created through masterful control of shades of gray:  there’s no silver employed. 

This makes an interesting juxtaposition with a large painting not far away, Opposing Merging of 1968 which is executed with metallic paint—a paint that is largely composed of copper.  Interestingly, the painting that actually contains metal does not feel metallic.  It transforms cold metal into something warm and luminous–like clouds in the sky at that moment of delicate transition when daylight starts to fade slightly and turn into sunset. 

Not least—though I’m afraid that I’m running out of space to discuss things at proper length–a wonderful compliment to Julian’s paintings is provided by the sculptures of his wife Barbara.  Interestingly Julian, who could be quite stubborn, compelled her to concentrate on sculpture rather than on painting.  In fact, this was a good decision because her sculpture does not compete with Julian’s painting but creates an experience which perfectly complements and supplements his work.  You don’t ask which of the two is a better artist; that feels beside the point; their respective notes harmonize like the notes in a harmonious musical chord. 

Barbara’s forte is hand-carved sculpture in wood and delicate control over translucent rock like alabaster or Calcium Calcite, works which bring out what one might term the spiritual essence, the archetypal nature of a piece of wood or stone.  Many of her translucent stones create a dialogue between the external sculptural form, which has concrete tactile existence, and an additional mysterious apparition buried within the stone.  This inner configuration evokes the forces of primordial cataclysm and liquid flow that gave birth to the stone, which are revealed to us through light that penetrates to its heart.  In short, both Julian and Barbara are essentially artists of light:  Julian of radiating light, Barbara of light that glows from within.