The American painter Ellsworth Kelly is now in his early eighties, but his recent work, now on display at the Serpentine Gallery, is fresh and vigorous and exactingly concentrated. Kelly works on the borderline between painting, collage, cut-out and sculpture. Some of his new works take the form of delicately shaped monochrome canvases, slices of pure unmodulated colour – blue, red, green, black – that seem fleetingly to evoke buried memories of how a place or an object once looked, to the artist, on a particular day. Others are formed from rectangular canvases painted in different colours and laid, one on top of the other, in arrangements that suggest fragments of remembered landscape. Sparest of all are a couple of white-on-white creations, in which the artist has used the same collage-like technique – laying one canvas on top of another – to draw a precisely calculated curve in void space. These works might be said to resemble snow-covered mountains but can also conjure up the elliptical form of a planet – or the moon, perhaps – seen against the expanse of the sky.
The teasing ambiguity is deliberate. Kelly has described his pictures as “memories that haven’t quite gelled”, which suggests that he likes them to hover somewhere between the recognisable and the unfathomable. He himself often does not know exactly where his sources of inspiration lie, or only discovers them years after a particular picture has been painted. This was a pattern set early on in his career. When he was a young man he showed a group of his collages to the French painter and sculptor Jean Arp, who asked him why, in one work, he had chosen to juxtapose a particular orange with a particular pink. Kelly replied, with some embarrassment, that he really had no idea....