In 1981, the composer Morton Feldman completed a long piece for solo piano which he called Triadic Memories. The “triad” of his title refers to the three-note chord construction that is the fundamental harmonic building block of Western classical and popular music. Though Feldman’s composition unfolds outside traditional harmony, one hears triads resonating through the chromatic cloud that arises from the decay of sustained tones. I was reminded of this piece as I walked through Howard Smith’s show at Jane Lombard Gallery, which features work dating from six decades of the artist’s career. Like Feldman’s music, Smith’s paintings are quiet, many of them monochromatic or nearly so, and slow, most constructed from an accumulation of small marks. But the quality that most recalled Feldman’s Triadic Memories is the spectral presence of the grid, dissolving but never disappearing, that underlies works varied in appearance and execution throughout the show.
Smith’s art is one of fundamentals—color, mark, surface—where qualities as slight as the direction of a brushstroke or the pressure of its application yield an outsize pictorial impact. Take Untitled (green) (1978–79), for example, which is comprised of rows of luminous, thinly applied golden green. The terminus of each horizontal mark meets the beginning of the next, creating a brief concentration of saturated color. Repeated across the surface, these points of overlap gather into a drifting vertical column and, in turn, establish the opposing axis of the grid. Rather than imposing a grid upon the picture, Smith allows it to emerge from the accumulation of marks. His art is rigorous without ever becoming systematic.
Works from his ongoing “Quasigrid” series show how flexibly he approaches the grid structure. As they traverse the canvas, the minuscule units in Quasigrid #39 (2019–24) are variously pinched, tapered, and attenuated so that they appear alternately to billow across the linen or to suggest a cylindrical volume. Like many visual effects in Smith’s work, this impression reads less as a methodical construction than a gradual transformation.
