by Stephen Truax

Ronnie Landfield asked, “Who are they to tell me I can’t be expressionistic? Who are they to tell me I can’t use imagery or paint landscapes? I don’t care if it’s ‘old fashioned.’” 1 His recalcitrance exemplifies the defiance of a youth spent in New York in the ’60s. 2 I mean, Landfield has spent his career pushing against the proprieties of what modern art is supposed to be. 3

Ronnie Landfield, “The Deluge,” 1998. Acrylic on canvas, 108 x 120″. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Brian Buckley.

In fact, Landfield reinvigorates the tradition of post-painterly New York School abstraction but with irrepressible references and sly allusions to landscape. 4 [H]is piled patches of pure color bring to mind rainbows, rolling hills, layers of clouds, sunsets and other natural phenomena. 5 [S]ome more bucolic, others brooding, contrarian and occasionally academic and his paintings attain varying degrees of painterly looseness. 6 The mores that Landfield sets out to tweak have long since given way to the untidy pluralism of anything goes. 7

Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko were implicitly landscape-like. […] Helen Frankenthaler and Jules Olitski revel[ed] unabashedly in romantic landscape associations. […] But Landfield is never as sumptuous as Frankenthaler or as fearless as Olitski. 8 His paintings draw on the heritage of mid-century abstraction, but the emotional resonances they achieve could not be more different. 9 At a time when a painting is expected to stand on its own, Landfield’s work can seem reactionary. 10

[T]he light in these paintings seems to come from behind the colors […] the translucent colors provide another kind of depth, which one looks past as well as into. 11 Landfield is a watercolorist able to do wonders with plastic paint. 12 Some paintings are [R]owdier splashes of color that drip and disrespect each other’s personal space. […] [A] hallucinogenic tone-poem of poured and stained color exploding up through the space of the canvas in violent billowing motion laced with tendrils of yellow and deep ochre. 13 Landfield is all light-filled joy. 14

Landfield also includes a horizontal band of hard-edged color at the bottom of these works, some minimalist “objecthood” from which to dive into the scenes. 15 [H]is trademark device […] gives the works a somewhat incongruously conceptual look. 16 They are hemmed at the bottom, like a mystical windowpane, by a band of pure thick robin’s egg blue. 17

In 2010, he painted a brooding and romantic evocation of a valley with encroaching storm 18 —anticipating Superstorm Sandy? In 2012, after the storm, his paintings adorned with the warm, vibrant, expansive and idyllic fields of color that Landfield is famous for—muted now due to the lack of light—afforded a peculiar irony. 19

“Come Together: Surviving Sandy […] had at its core the democratic premise that artists affected by the hurricane would exhibit their work. […] The central gallery offered a grand vista of monumental canvases by Ronnie Landfield. 20 Landfield, whose personal archive succumbed to the flood and yet somehow triumphed through restoration and the added luster of unintended further stain.” 21 Landfield’s two massive canvases at Surviving Sandy symbolized or came to symbolize the maelstrom—or the sun emerging from behind the clouds just after.