Jeff Way: Then & Now: 1970–2024
Lyle Rexer
September 27, 2024
Trust the process. Art’s a way of doing something, more than it is a way of saying something. And if it shows anything, it shows that way of doing something. There is a modesty in this that draws back from Big Ideas (and Big Emotions) and instead pursues provisional strategies: “What if I tried…” So an artist sets the terms, ships out, and lives to see where the process takes them. Best case, we go along for the ride. Jeff Way’s paintings at Storage show just how far that might lead.
It's a fifty-four year retrospective that is as eye-popping as it is anomalous. It leaves out the entire torso of Way’s career and leaps from the feet to the head, so to speak, from the early 1970s directly to now. And it leaves us to figure out how he’s gotten here. But the clues are everywhere, and what they reveal is how trust in a process can open up some very Big Ideas after all. What these paintings have in common through their different periods is their investigation of the intimate relations between chance and intention, control and surrender, color and structure, hand and mind, and even between bodily presence and absence. These are dichotomies we tend to take for granted, or even ignore, never asking whether they are opposed, how they might be reconciled, or what their actual relations are.
In the second room of the gallery there is a large canvas that shows how Way set things going. Untitled from 1970 was done without a brush, from puffs of color made by snapping pigment-saturated string lines across the canvas. As with all the work in the exhibition, the lines were carefully plotted and provided a kind of deep structure for the creation of the painting. But the very process of repetition and building through each successive action complicated the surface and obscured, not to say compromised, that order. In the earliest painting at the gallery, Untitled (Green), a giant from 1969–70 that looks more like a Monet than a Way, the artist was already exploring the tension between an underpainted grid and an overpainted spontaneously applied surface. A mottled and shifting cloud of green seems to float over a lighter sea, shot with strikes of violet. Barely detectable through it all are striations that signal we are not at sea or gazing at a lily pond but part of a more complicated environment, stable and shifting at the same time. Nodding to Meyer Shapiro, whose lecture he attended at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, Way calls it “an homogenous, autonomous surface.” It suggests an almost infinite set of possible variations on the notion of scripted but unpredictable work.
As the paintings become less “atmospheric” after 1971, Way’s strategy becomes clearer and the choices more involved. The artist might, for example, select particular combinations of six colors or nine, vary the rhythm of their appearances in the grid, repeat or re-snap any of the lines to complicate the sense of over and under. Or, most strikingly, the artist could simply remove any contrasting colors and experiment with building a dense structure based only on shades of white or black. Of the former there were several arresting examples, in different sizes, from the period around 1972. As Way remarked in a recent interview, “At that time, materials were cheaper, and you could experiment freely, discovering, for example, that there were at least ten different hues of white.” If all this puts us in mind of Brice Marden’s sequential minimalism, or Ad Reihardt’s reduction to monochrome, or Robert Ryman’s obsession with white, the fascinating thing is how an artist like Way reveals the many strands of thinking and doing that New York artists explored as they moved away from the overwrought metaphysics of the 1950s. It was very much a search for a method—not a subject—and the Whitney Museum curator Marcia Tucker took that pulse in her prescient 1969 exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials.
Thinking of Way as a spectral magnet, a special kind of channeler, or a barometer of changing artistic procedures, we will have to wait for future exhibitions that show his fascinating transit through new image painting, photo-based communication pieces, mask-making, and even shamanistic performances. But the grid—and its flipside, the unavoidable temptation of accident—never went away. The recent paintings bring this back energetically but have been inspired by a new set of visual and tactile preoccupations. For one thing, Way wanted to be more engaged with the act of painting, to be present with a brush. This changes everything about his (and our) relationship to form. Each of the paintings had to be articulated in a more precise, not to say finicky way. Distance vanishes, flatness prevails, but at the same time we are drawn more deeply into the labyrinth of the grid and the intricacies of its color and spatial relations. At a casual glance, the paintings look like variants of plaid, as if we had wandered into a psychedelic fabric shop, but the visual orders they propose are more subtle. Their structures are based on eccentric—off center—squares whose lines overlap and interweave, and wherever the lines of different colors intersect there is a point of bleeding, a suggestion that order itself, fixed in a constructed image, is nevertheless temporary. The closer we look, the less precise the structure appears. Order is less a fact than an idea, and entropy always wins. But until it does, the universe pulses with the spectrum of every wavelength and glows with an ultimate confidence.