Alex Bacon: "Critics' Picks: David Novros"

David Novros’s current exhibition comprises four paintings and four works on paper from the 1970s. All postdate his first site-specific fresco from 1970, which was commissioned by Donald Judd for his Spring Street residence in New York City. Novros, so much more than a Minimalist, is interested in continuing the tradition of painting as an immersive, site-specific experience—as it is in Paleolithic cave art, Byzantine mosaics, and Renaissance frescos—one that can profoundly alter its surrounding architecture.

Untitled, 1975, is a large-scale work painted with luminescent monochromatic blocks assembled into two unconventionally shaped canvases evoking basic post-and-lintel construction, or a fragmented pictorial rectangle. His palette is restrained and often evokes the richness of earth and unpolished stones, as in the tripartite Lent Painting, 1975, which is full of glossy blacks, dusty reds, and greens.

Novros understands that paintings are objects, as have many in the generation of artists with whom he came of age. But he also senses the importance of allowing painterly intuition to take control. Perhaps the most important thing he shares with his Minimalist peers and the lineage of in situ art to which he responds is the desire to activate the viewer as he or she takes in the work. For example, in Untitled (Frog Altar), 1975, the work changes, tonally and physically, as we walk from one side of the piece to the other—as do we, phenomenologically speaking. This bodily engagement through the artist’s reductive painterly facture is the reason Novros was one of the handful of painters Judd supported, and it is also what makes Novros relevant today.

— Alex Bacon