Robert Swain's paintings are difficult to categorize. His intense engagement with color gives him an affinity with the Impressionists and their heirs. Yet the gridded clarity of his color patterns recalls Minimalists geometry. Just as Carl Andre arranged twelve by twelve inch metal plates in floor pieces he called "carpets," so Swain assembled the paintings in this exhibition from birch panels of the same dimensions. Of course, each of Swain's panels is covered with acrylic paint ina hue adjusted with exquisite precision to the surrounding hues -- and to the overall pattern of the painting of which it forms an indispensable part. With vision caught up in the sensuous yet stately flow of color across the surface of the painting, thoughts of Minimalist grids and boxes evaporate. Despite his use of geometric structure, Swain could be seen as an anit-Minimalist. But that is too narrow a view of his achievement. By foucsing so directly on color, Swain has challenged assumptions basic to Western cultures's view of reality.

Writing in the 5th century B.C., the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras stated that matter is prior to color. In his cosmology, as in others from the period, color was contingent, a quality added to material form by the quirks of human vision. This distinction between essential form and inessential color persisted over the centuries, affecting not only science but also art. Thus line and tonal modeling predominated in Renaissance painting, where color seres as form's embellishment--though the high-keyed palette of Titian, Tintoretto, and other Venetians of the Renaissance provided some resisteance to the authority of linear form. Nonetheless, it was not until the mid-19th century that Claude Monet and the other Impressionists dared to make images from the play of sheer color. What the Impressionists achieved intuitively, the Neo-Impressionists--Georges Seurat and Paul Serusier among them--subjected to systematic analysis. They were guided in part by the writings of a chemist named Michel Eugene Chevreul, a figure Swain mentions in one of his statements.

Invoking Chevreul's Law of Simulaneous Contrast, Swain notes that when red and green are juxtaposed "the contrast is heightened." He adds that our experience of the contrast originates in "the energy generated by the convergence of [the] unique spectral wavelengths" of these colors.