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Space through Color: An Interview with Richard Pugliese (April 2005)
by Michael Brennan
Reproduced with permission of the author.

Michael Brennan: We both combine structural elements with atmospheric expanses in our painting. How did you arrive at this opposition?

Richard Pugliese: I don't think that it's something that I arrived at, but rather something that I started with. It was an intrinsic part of my sensibility. Going back to the Greek concept of dichotomy, it's a struggle between the senses and the intellect, or the perceptual and the conceptual. That might be an innate aspect of one's own persona. What I've been trying to do all these years is to synthesize these two different aspects of my sensibility. I like to think that I'm getting closer to that now.

MB: We discussed some similarities between your abstractions and Cezanne's Bibemus Quarry. What is it specifically about his painting that interests you?

RP: I think that it has to do with his creating a sense of monumental form and space without resorting to traditional Western techniques. Cezanne creates a certain depth through the tactile quality of his paint application and his sensitivity to tonal changes. I like to think of it as a kind of color space-space created through color.

MB: How has Mondrian influenced your painting?

RP: He's not so much of an influence on my work at present, but generally speaking it's his horizontal and vertical division of the surface into multiple planes. I'm attracted to his structural thinking-his breaking up of the surface plane into smaller areas.

MB: How has Rothko influenced your painting?

RP: His emphasis on color-pure color, and also, like Cezanne, it's the monumentality of Rothko's forms that I find to be an overwhelming influence.

MB: What is it about the monumental?

RP: It's a subjective quality. The way a form or shape might tap into some powerful collective memory, or events of history. Monumental form sometimes suggests that a subject exists beyond the structure itself. Stonehenge is one example that comes to mind. The stones themselves are wonderful as shapes, but they do have another meaning-some psychic or religious meaning that lies beyond the structure

MB: Are we talking about something unlimited, larger than the physical fact?

RP: Yes.

MB: Have you been influenced by any aspect of postmodernism whatsoever?

RP: No.

MB: How has folk art, or your passion for Salt Glazed Pottery in particular, influenced your painting?

RP: It has influenced me in its simplicity, purity, and variety of invention. The Salt Glazed Stoneware Pottery retains evidence of the human hand and recalls the forms of the Earth-rocks and clay.

MB: I think that earthiness is a quality that's almost completely absent in contemporary art.

RP: There's been a lot of sculpture that has that earthiness, but not so much recent painting.

MB: When I look at your paintings I like them the same way that I like looking at old walls, like an old wall in a Romanesque Church.

RP: Although it's not Romanesque, I like looking at the designs of Palladio -- the Palladian window especially, which is a combination of a circle and a rectangle. There's a strong relationship between my surfaces and stonework. It's something in the structure and architecture of my art-the engineering aspect of it.

MB: They remind me of that great brick wall that surrounds Old St. Patrick's Cathedral in Little Italy.

RP: Well, I go past there a lot and I like to run my hands over it when I walk by. All of my influences, like the walls of that churchyard, eventually come to the surface.

MB: Are there any areas in which you feel that modernist painting, generally speaking, is lacking right now?

RP: I feel that modernist non-objective painting has to begin to develop a new space. The traditional Western devices for defining space were flushed out in the 20th century when painting was reduced to an extreme minimalism and I think that we have to start rebuilding upon that now-developing a new space from ground zero. That's what I'm trying to do, and I think it's going to take awhile. One of abstract paintings' greatest attributes is its potential for endless renewal and the possibilities that remain for further invention.

MB: A critic like Benjamin Buchloh might characterize this negatively as a potential for endless repetition, so I guess it's just a question of perspective.

RP: That aspect of recurrence within modernist abstraction is itself a kind of innovation-a contribution of sorts.

MB: How do you recognize when one of your paintings is finished?

RP: There's no clear criteria. It's highly subjective and personal-knowing that everything looks right and that it should remain untouched. I can't always make clear judgments very quickly; sometimes the realization takes weeks or months after I've stopped looking at things.

MB: How would you describe your color sensibility?

RP: I don't know that I really have one. I'm drawn to certain colors but I don't know if that's significant or not. I can't define it.

MB: What for you remains to be discovered by working abstractly?

RP: Again, I'm interested in a new kind of space. I want to reintroduce some new kind of complexity-a greater spatial complexity. After you're done with a one-color canvas, everything that you do afterwards is illusionistic. I'm interested in an illusionistic space. You can't eliminate that unless you're working with sculpture. Marks automatically create a figure-ground relationship, even on a monochromatic surface. The problem I'm facing is to make a more dynamic relationship between marks and shapes, foreground and ground-defining space through color. Does that make sense to you?