In studio after studio, I observed that practice, and I was at first as seduced by it as anyone else; remembering the sixties, however, I soon began to look harder at sure-fire effects that often failed to go beyond mere sentimentality, and I became wary whenever I encountered pictures incorporating wax.
I had seen some of David Ortins’s paintings by the time Susan Stoops and I first visited his studio in 1994. He had been doing geometric abstractions that were executed on white wax grounds, but the wax mostly served to provide a clean support and didn’t call particular attention to itself, so it was accordingly unproblematic.
The new pictures presented an entirely different situation. Instead of an overall geometry, the images consisted of two or three spare rivulets of color—red or yellow or black—that flowed easily from top to bottom in the center of each painting and dramatically exposed the wax ground, making it pictorially assertive where it had before been hardly noticeable. Forewarned, I would have thought the situation risky, but instead it took my breath away. Smooth and immaculate, the whiteness of the wax slab felt as pure as natural light, detached and impersonal, yet exhilarating.
Reference
Excerpts from (2011) Curatorial Flashbacks #17: Writing About Art, Part 2. By Carl Belz
