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Developing Insight. Geometric painters are a dime a dozen these days. But few of them command the critical respect or the youthful following that Noland inspires. One obvious difference, for anyone who has seen a Noland painting, is that he somehow imparts through his brush, his sponges and his rollers a zest and vigor, a freshness and exuberance that other geometricists lack. As he analyzes it, the impression derives from his own deeply felt delight in the act of painting and his evolving style. In human relationships, Noland will explain with an engaging leer, "you're involved with someone as long as something is developing, changing or insightful. Painting is the same way."
Moreover, Noland's supposedly impersonal canvases are vividly imbued with a dozen remarkably personal characteristics—pride, imposed logic, arrogance, grace, wit, independence and inner tension. Noland conveys these qualities, not deliberately but intuitively. In such works as Vista or Via Gleam, which to the superficial casual viewer may look like mattress ticking, his pride is made manifest through their towering dimensions. These 5-ft. by 12-ft. canvases surround and subdue the viewer with their commanding presence. The artist's grace and bravado show up in the audacious ease with which he lays together subtly different, visually demanding colors. Vista elegantly challenges the viewer to contemplate the precise differences between more than a dozen shades of pink.
Via Gleam is a stately, classical sinfonietta that can be read—rather like a simplified musical score—from top to bottom. It opens with a four-note theme of palest yellows made of three narrow stripes and followed by a wider one-much like the "V for Victory" opening of Beethoven's Fifth. However, Noland's sprightlier pastorale modulates into a green andante, followed by an adagio of cornsilk white, a reprise of mint, and a coda built around a bland band of airy, spring-sky blue.
Taken together, his paintings are bold emblems of a man resolute to explore a new avenue to visual satisfaction.