Robert Rector's new paintings are grounded in the same principles of modernist painting that have guided his work for at least four decades. His unwavering belief in the importance of nonobjective painting continues to inspire his ongoing investigations into the expressive possibilities of color field painting. His recent works are architectonic in their exploration of sculptural form, playful in their subtle illusionism and sensuous in their use of strong saturated color. They also open up a dialogue between the painting and the wall through the carefully controlled use of a shallow illusionist space created by the use of strong elemental forms. Composed of multiple rectangular panels, these paintings read as though they are much larger; the relationships are such that you are unable to take in the entirety of the work in a single glance. The arbiter in these new paintings is Rector's use of dynamic tension as a compositional device. His use of carefully studied composition both energizes the overall geometric structure of each piece while also acting as the mediating principle that balances the relationship between color, form, and texture.

This new direction is deeply rooted in his previous investigations, but began in earnest with a series of paper works that explored blocks of highly textured color suspended in a composition of dynamic tension. The series was inspired by his delight in watching his grandchild enthralled in the familiar activity of stacking and restacking wooden blocks. What interests the artist is not the tangible structural relationships created by the haphazard nature of the stacked blocks, but rather the fleeting moment that these individual elements somehow create the illusion of a stable static structure. Rector has chosen to explore that fleeting moment of stability when the blocks are not quite standing or falling, but, for a split second, teetering somewhere in between. This moment of resolution, however brief, is a magical one for the artist. "They somehow find that balance, then, they fall. What I want to capture is that one moment when everything is as it should be." In pursuit of his goal, he is using an art of space to capture an illusive moment in time.

His first works were investigations on paper, and like the children's blocks themselves, were vertical stacks of rectangular forms of different colors and textures out of alignment with one another along the vertical plane. Although they were not as radical in their entropy as the stacked blocks, they nevertheless set up an inviting visual tension when played off the outside rectangle of the paper, which is in turn played off the rectangle of the frame. It is not, however, the pure geometries that make these works intriguing. On repeated viewings, it is the interaction of the delicate textures and the interplay of color that gives these pieces their complexity. The use of color is neither harmonious nor dissonant, but establishes an emotional mode for each piece. The importance of layering and time is also an integral part of Rector's artistic process. These paper works are the result of the continual application, scraping and reapplication of paint until the desired level of surface complexity is realized in each work.

Feeling that the flatness of the paper was limiting his ability to push his ideas into the three dimensional realm, Rector began making slightly larger compositions on stretched canvas that retained the same approach of the paper works, but allowed him to pull the surface of the paintings away from the wall. Soon he was composing the panels horizontally, breaking with the literal verticality of stacked blocks, and applying the ideas developed in the paper works to larger compositions that opened up a new dialogue between the architectonic structure, color and texture, with the wall behind. These larger paintings may be understood in a line of American modernist painting that began in the 1950's with the work of Barnet Newman, Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella. At a time when American painting dominated the world stage, a new line erupted from the school of Abstract Expressionism that stressed, to use Barnet Newman's term, the "object matter" of a painting over the question of subject matter. This debate was the subject of Robert Rector's graduate thesis, an investigation of the concept of "painting as an object" played off against the traditional understanding of a painting as a window of illusionistic space. Particularly important to his investigation was Frank Stella's simple idea that a painting is merely an object, nothing more, nothing less. Any other reading, to Stella's way of thinking at the time, was needless editorializing or literary fantasy. His goal, provocatively stated, was to make the paint on the canvas as good as it was in the bucket. Stella's shaped canvases, often cut out to reveal the wall behind them, and Ellsworth Kelly's minimal compositions of rectangular forms on thick stretchers that float from the wall, are both important points of reference for Rector's work.

Even though these theoretical positions of the fifties that contributed to the rise of Minimal Art are now part of history, they are still important to Rector's work. However, the puritanical rigor with which they were applied decades ago is no longer a reductive straight jacket that he feels that he must embrace. Like Stella, he still carefully plans each composition beforehand. Using graph paper and cut out pieces of colored paper reminiscent of Josef Albers study exercises in his Color Theory, Rector's creative process combines the use of intuition and rational analysis to plan the composition of each piece on a small scale. However, unlike the reductive approach championed in the 1950's, his recent work is an investigation into abstract painting and its ability to create associations that are seductive for both the artist and viewer alike. For him, these associations are intuitive and accidental. His primary concern, like those artists that continue to inspire him, is to capture the experience of the artist on the canvas. The introduction of found objects and suggestive textures, however, clearly reveal Rector's interest in painting as an additive, rather than a subtractive process. True to his modernist beliefs, these works, like the many before them, have no narrative intent. He still holds on to the belief that successful painting is a world to itself. "I try not to make landscapes of these paintings," he observes, "but I do not live in New York, and as a southerner, the influence of nature is obviously important." Ultimately, these works are permeated by an overwhelming sense of serenity. In these paintings, the purposeful tension of the architectonic forms is delicately balanced against the harmony of the subtle variations of color from panel to panel.

Robert Rector's humanized, sensuous practice of abstract painting cleverly adapts his enduring beliefs in the goals of modern painting to the concerns of the 21st century. This approach, not unlike the celebrated adaptation of modernist forms and ideas in contemporary architecture, revisits the longstanding ideas and practices without the ideological stridency that often pushed artists to extremer positions. In a world out of control we cannot overvalue serenity. Robert Rector's new paintings offer us this and more.

All of the artist's comments were taken from a conversation in his studio outside Baton Rouge, on the morning of 25 Mar 2006.