On Charles Gaines at the Studio Museum in Harlem

This dazzling retrospective of the early work of African American artist Charles Gaines, whose achievements have somehow escaped my attention lo these many years, is not only the strongest thing I’ve seen in years but also a manifestation of a specific kind of art — visually spare, coolly conceptual, and deeply iterative — that has immense personal appeal for me. It was a revelation, and one that I will be thinking about for a very long time.

Verbal descriptions of artwork are always to some degree or another deeply problematic, for obvious reasons, but perhaps even more so than usual in Gaines’s case. The reason is that in Gaines’s work we find what I consider an extraordinarily sophisticated conceptual schema whose visual instantiation is extremely minute and detailed. Its basic structure is tripartite, consisting of 1. a photo of a tree; 2. the outline of the tree traced onto graph paper; and 3) the outline replaced by matrices of impossibly small and meticulous hand-lettered numerals, row after row. (I love trees, and I love numbers, and I love graph paper, so I have been genetically engineered for maximum possible receptiveness to Gaines’s work.) The result is awe-inspiring and beautiful but also strange and even a little creepy. To take something as immediately identifiable as living and natural and unique as a tree and then reduce it by stages to pure numbers feels weirdly clinical. There’s something almost autistic in the relentless precision and ruthless narrowness of focus, a single-mindedness that feels alienating and purging; in this way, it is perfectly expressive of the post-minimalist moment.

I considered and then rejected two further observations that I am going to include anyway. The first is that distilling physical forms to their essence by sheer iterative force of numbers could be considered prescient of the Internet, because that is what digital rendering is; but I have become extremely tired of this species of gimmicky thinking, this tendency to evaluate the worth of something by how conveniently it can be retrofitted to anticipate the Internet. (You get this a lot these days — “Montaigne would have loved Twitter!” — as if that somehow makes Montaigne more worthwhile.) The second is that it occurred to me that Charles Gaines began making these almost superhumanly controlled pieces of art during the 1970s, when cerebral abstractions based on mathematical structures were hardly the, uh, most common form of discourse among young black Americans. I was starting to wonder aloud what this might mean, if anything, about racial identity or sublimation in regards aesthetic strategies, but my museum-going companion Dr. Santiago, thankfully, scotched the thought at its source. What I will say is that there is some set of operations at work in this art, the merging of the mathematical and the natural, the sense of logical structures being deployed in the creation of these clean, streamlined, rigorously pristine visual objects, that is profoundly satisfying.