Art in Review; Robert Mangold
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: March 2, 2007
Column Structure Paintings
545 West 22nd Street, Chelsea
Through March 10
When it comes to artistic means, the painter Robert Mangold has barely budged in more than 40 years. He is still working on mostly shaped canvases to which he adds a quiet but ringing monochrome and a few spare ruled and freehand lines that make everything pop.
Mr. Mangold's subject is essentially the making and the apprehension of the making of his paintings. His latest works take the measure of themselves with a combination of transparency and mystery that is hard to resist. Titled ''Column Structure I'' through ''Column Structure XII,'' these 12 canvases each have a central vertical trunk measuring 10 feet high and 2 feet wide that is subdivided by straight, horizontal lines and appended with squares or triangles that jut from the sides, usually near the top.
Redolent of fractured letters or numbers, architectural beams and, of course, columns and capitals, each is traversed bottom to top by two abstract lines -- one single, one double -- that undulate or curve regularly or irregularly, but usually visit all the painting's subdivisions, like a cursory circulatory system.
Thus a series of contrasts, buffered by color, is orchestrated between ever-expanding linear categories: between the different curved lines; between the curved, drawn lines and the straight ones; and between all the lines and the angular outlines of the paintings themselves.
These works offer a tune-up of the mind-eye connection. They put ''less is more'' into an active tense by repeatedly and in different ways showing a little doing a lot, and then some more. It seems that disclosure can't get much fuller than in these paintings, even as you realize that you won't be getting to the bottom of them. ROBERTA SMITH