Stanley Whitney describes his travels to Egypt and Italy, where he visited Naples and Rome, in the early 1990s as key inspirational moments for his expressive works that are characterized by stacked and juxtaposed color fields, as they would fundamentally change the overall arrangement of his paintings, as well as his approach to structure, geometry, organization and composition. Whitney studied the buildings’ historic architecture, their construction of stacked blocks of stone and facades with closely spaced windows, such as that of Palazzo Farnese. In 2022, the artist's works were aptly exhibited at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi in Venice (collateral event of 59th Biennale di Venezia, in cooperation with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum), with a facade consisting of numerous large windows and architectural elements that organize the building horizontally, it also reminds of the structure of Whitney's paintings.

Since the early 1990s, the painter has devoted himself to the artistic exploration of a very specific formal composition, his today famous recurring grid structures, which he gradually fills with close and dense lines of strong and saturated colors. In addition, the works are structured by three to five horizontal, narrow stripes of color. Whitney explains: "The grid came out of the idea of making it really simple. I wanted to have a format that was very simple so that the color could be the complex thing, it would all be about the color. [.] The format is so simple that the color can be free." (Whitney in an interview with the Colección Isabel y Agustín Coppel A.C., https://youtu.be/sMwnBniuONM)

The creative process behind the works is closely linked to music, Whitney's second great passion, which is also reflected in the work’s title (or the titles of the associated series of works) "Stay Song". Going from upper left to lower right, the artist fills the picture’s surface with a broad brush and places one block of color next to the other, almost like writing music notes on a piece of paper. "A color calls another color", explains the artist (in an interview with Alteronce Gumby, Oral History Project, April 21, 2014, quoted from: www.bombmagazine.org/articles/stanley-whitney/). This way the tonality of each color square determines the following one: a process that the music lover Whitney compares to the "call and response" principle between two solo instruments in jazz. The musical concept of harmony also plays a major role in Whitney's work, because it is harmony and disharmony in the interaction and the clash of the adjacent color values that makes for the unique appeal of his expressive, dynamic and rhythmic works.

The result is a painterly quilt, a square, composed of fields of bright colors with a winning rhythm and melody. With its synaesthetic energy, it appeals to not just one but several senses: "You are fixed in place as the painting dances around you", a journalist once wrote about Whitney's works (Arunda D'Souza for www.artnews.com, May 30, 2017). After the revolutionary works of American Color Field Painting of the 1940s and 1950s, Whitney succeeds in breathing new energy and new life into abstract painting of the 21st century with his captivating, simply constructed and yet complex color compositions. [CH]