Rothko's expressionist canvas lies within the realm of the Poetics, a sensual celebration of the emotive aesthetic as read within the soaking paint, melting shapes, and breathing colors. Without absolutes, universals, balance or harmony, the signage floats unanchored along the edge of human consciousness. While some critics state that art is dead as it has reached its conclusion in perfectly knowing itself, in knowing what it is, it would be more appropriate to recognize the collapse of critical, propositional, or epistemological structures. Through this venture into the narcissistic realm of projections and reflections, the reader sees the self as the other and the other as the self. The human is exalted as the divine, and the divine is anthopomorphized.
Truth is sought in the drama within, and the powers without.
Art's chromatic and calligraphic torsions and tensions shape a self-nourishing enthusiasm which continually spirals upwards culminating in a religious, phenomenological liberation of the reader. Simulating the flatness of commercial sign painting, the brown skin functions as a palimpsest, a tabula rasa , onto which our private selves flow. The artist has not invented anything, but he has engaged everything. The work is made up of endlessly proliferating meanings which have no stable point of origin, nor of closure. Obviously, as Donald Judd observed, with the acknowledgment of these oblique shifts in frames and formats, linear history unravels and art history ceases to be developmental.