Thickness/Flatness + Thinness

Hubert Damisch’s Fenetre jaune cadmium (1984) was in many ways a riposte to American, Greenbergian formalism which dominated painting’s post-war discursive field. Damisch’s articulation of painting’s thickness as the ground zero of the medium was the crucial concept which challenged Greenberg and that flatness is the site of the painting’s specificity. In Painting as Model, Yve-Alain Bois compounded this opposition by discussing the two formalisms, geographically displaced as the USA and Europe, and where thickness and flatness mark the divide as well as collage being fundamental to the European side.

Thickness is a useful concept with which to examine paintings by French artists such as François Rouan where strips of canvas are woven together generating a literal thickness of the surface and also generating an alternance between the visible and the hidden. The quality by which something is obscured is important to Christian Bonnefoi and where collage is firmly installed into the repertoire of painting. In Bonnefoi’s work the thickness of the painting surface is problematised, through the use of the translucent material tarlatan. When he paints on both sides of the tarlatan the beholder is brought into the proximity of the surface’s thinness; that it is barely there. The quality of the surface is in terms of its thinness. Perhaps even its infra-thiness (to allude to the Duchampian understanding of the term)? Other explorations of the infra-thin can be perceived in the works of Simon Hantaï and Dominique Figarella.

Thickness/Flatness + Thinness are discussed in these terms and with these references and will hopefully expand upon Duchamp’s unwitting presence amidst formalist border skirmishes.

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