ROBERT KELLY

A mantra is designed to penetrate the surface of thought and bring up non-intellectual information stored in the subconscious. A visual mantra is designed to organize and balance intuition, filling in the gaps, supplying details, and bringing every tangent back around to its origin. Where a mantra leaves off is where consciousness begins. Vision burns phoenix-like through the ashes of the status quo. Light penetrates the glaze of familiarity and affords perception of the wisdom beneath.

Robert Kelly’s art projects a sense of Zen-like reduction. His process is vigorous yet meditative, as he applies paint, scrapes it away, glazes it, and repeats the process until he achieves the texture for which he is justly famous. The spirit of time lingers in the finished painting, invoking weathered manuscripts and age-darkened amber. "I have a great reverence for history, for what time and civilization do to the surface of things," says Kelly. "I am interested in the barely discernible meaning found in weathered surfaces."

Kelly is one of the few abstract painters in Santa Fe who can lay claim to having been born in the old city. Having secured his education and his international reputation in the metropolitan Northeast, he was in the fortunate position of being able to return to his birthplace on his own terms when Santa Fe developed into a major art center.

Kelly resides in both New Mexico and New York. He was at work the day the World Trade Center fell, just three blocks from his studio. With no thought for his own safety, he grabbed a camera and began chronicling what he saw and felt as the structures gave way and the smoke and dust blotted out the sun. One week later, his studio still off limits in the Red Zone, he was able with official help to go in and hand carry his paintings two blocks to a waiting truck parked outside the fences. He got them to New Mexico barely in time for his exhibit in Galisteo. Kelly’s longtime fascination with the buried history of mark making was sharpened during that period. Objects, architecture, and surfaces change with time as they are washed with color or covered with marks, then wiped clean. Marginal notations are made and removed. The few remaining traces fascinate the eye with their suggestion of what might still be there.

With his new work becoming more formal and less referential, Robert Kelly seems more interested in the play of edges that create a tonal and atonal concerto of lines. As he cuts and realigns blocks of color into configurations like musical scores, calligraphic notations, or quilted puzzles, ancient information rises to the surface and becomes almost visible.