Painting: A Bird’s- & Worm’s-Eye View

An abstract picture, by definition, refers to no reality but its own. But lately several abstract painters have begun to create works that utilize one of the most venerable conventions of representative painting—perspective. Though the impressionists made light of it, the cubists deliberately flouted it, and abstract expressionists ignored it, perspective now seems to be staging a comeback—with a significant difference. Where the Renaissance relied on it to convey an illusion of reality,* the new painters use it as a playful device for emphasizing the gap between reality and illusion.

Manhattan’s Gerhardt Liebmann, 39, recently exhibited a series of canvases that show nothing but bricks, forming endless cells or piled in heaps that stretch away to infinity. Their dreamlike, surreal character is conveyed by Liebmann’s adroit deviations from strict perspective. The bricks at the upper edges of his canvases do not tilt in toward the vanishing point in the center as much as they should. Thus Liebmann creates the impression of an infinitely expanding sterile waste. The bricks also suggest the relentless monotony and cubicled isolation of big-city living, where, in Liebmann’s opinion, “we’ve built barriers around ourselves, architecturally and emotionally.”

Latvian-born Sven Lukin, 34, also distorts perspective to reflect the pressures of Manhattan life. Of his grey and pink Squeeze, he explains: “Think of tender flesh squeezed under an environment that is all speed, cement and cars. Grey is an urban color.” Squeeze seems to loom above the viewer far larger than its actual eight feet because its vanishing point is situated a foot or so below the painting, in what is known as “worm’s-eye perspective.” Traditionally, perspective was used to make a painting seem to open a window into the wall; Lukin uses the technique to make Squeeze jut out.

Mid-Air. Los Angeles’ Ron Davis maintains that his 4-in.-thick slabs of tutti-frutti-colored fiber glass, cast in glossy, translucent and sometimes opalescent layers, are meant to be “about” nothing but “what colors are and where you put them.” If a visitor suggests that Davis’ flat shapes seem to hang away from the wall and look very much like twelve-sided swimming pools, Davis will protest that all he meant to depict was “the illusion of a dodecahedron.” What makes the dodecahedron distinctively different is that it is shown as though seen from far, far above. The effect is achieved by using “bird’s-eye perspective,” a method that relies on three vanishing points instead of one. Though long known, it was rarely used before the 20th century came along with its airplanes and skyscrapers. The viewer thus placed, as it were, in midair, may well feel as though the ground were falling away beneath him. For any 20th century man, the sensation may carry the added shock of recognition.

* As developed by 15th century draftsmen, perspective is a set of rules that enables the artist to convey the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane by making his structural lines converge at an imaginary “vanishing point” on an imaginary horizon at the viewer’s eye level.