The Painting in Front of Itself: Frank Stella’s Atypical ‘Projective’ Spaces through Canvas, Paint and Colour

Abstract Frank Stella’s early works tend to be characterised as displaying the flatness of painted surfaces and an ambition to negate pictorial illusionism. However, beyond their emphasis on flatness, these early series of paintings generate new forms of illusions and, in some cases, initiate another type of pictorial space — one that bodies forth, coming toward the viewer, appearing as if in front of the canvas. We consider the materials of the painting format in Stella’s early work (1959 to 1986) that create or facilitate the emergence of such a protruding or ‘projective’ space: mainly canvas, types and colours of paint. After introducing notions of flatness and illusionism and our respective approaches, we focus on Stella’s use of unprimed, raw, canvas, on the one hand, and his use of reflective and fluorescent paint skins, on the other, and how paint and canvas relate to each other. We focus on the material conditions that Stella sets up to manifest his intentions regarding the perception of space in painting and where he believes painting ‘should’ go. Indeed, in a book published in 1986, Stella describes projective effects from painters who use different tactics than his, but he does not reveal how he achieves his own. We analyse precisely which elements in Stella’s early paintings trick the eye of the viewer into seeing a painting, as it were, in front of itself, and we demonstrate the aesthetic impact of Stella’s chosen materials. Or how colour, paint and canvas, working together in a sort of symbiosis, generate a protruding effect in a new, previously unseen manner, and challenge Stella’s assertions against illusionism.