Sol LeWitt Irene Barberis: Exploring the Chester Studio

Irene Barberis is an artist who bravely charts her own path.

Irene Barberis’ work ranges from the monumental The Tapestry of Light, 2006-2019, which combines nanotechnology with Christian apocalyptic imagery, to a variety of minimalist chromatic and formal statements characterised by a conceptual rigor. These seemingly contrary impulses are also evident in her latest project, a book that visually documents the final studio of Sol LeWitt, her friend for over thirty years. On one level, the book pays homage to LeWitt’s famous 1980 Autobiography, the pages of which consist of uniform grids of photographs cataloguing “every object” in his combined studio and living space in New York City. However, Barberis’ book documents more than just objects. It captures her own way of seeing, experiencing, and understanding by reactivating her fellow artist’s studio—dormant since his death in 2007—into a site of profound inspiration and boundless creativity.

The book is divided into two parts, the first of which consists of a meticulous yet intuitive photographic record of the studio, which LeWitt built in 1990 in Chester, Connecticut. The building’s spatial layout is clarified by a diagram labelled with the basic features, from the entrance mezzanine to a narrow exterior balcony. The close-up colour photographs are mainly arranged in orderly grids (from two by two to six by six), alternating with full-page details and wider views. They offer a somewhat sequential tour that lingers here and there: at a drafting table with its rulers and T-squares; a shelving unit with pinned up family snapshots and New York Times obituaries for Konrad Fischer and Mario Merz; a tape deck and cassettes of Schumann, Beethoven, and Strauss; a whiteboard preserving a list of final projects; and a massive bulletin board layered with more than a decade’s worth of postcards, exhibition announcements, and other mementos. Some object types are grouped together: chairs, studio samples and tests, maquettes, photographs and books, selected studio objects and tools, etc.

As the book shifts focus to LeWitt’s paint trolley, worktable, and painting wall, one of Barberis’ ultimate goals is revealed: to capture the material evidence of LeWitt’s almost daily practise as a painter (a relatively unknown aspect of his career, wonderfully elucidated here in an essay by Janet Passehl). In this section, the photo grids become more complex, reflecting an almost archaeological examination of brushes, containers, and lids, along with details of painterly residue—colourful splatters, spills, drips, and ghostly outlines of the thousands of gouaches created in the space. Much more than objective documentation, these gorgeously arranged details are expressions of Barberis’ own aesthetic. Indeed, the photographs reflect not only her personal vision but also her bodily presence. In several instances, her hand is featured opening a wooden box, gripping a utility knife, paging through a book, and reaching for one of LeWitt’s brushes. She explores the studio with her eyes and hands, like an artist but also like a pilgrim luxuriating in every aspect of a sacred place. There is a kind of medieval sensibility at play, reverential yet fully invested in the site’s materiality as a pathway of discovery. As Barberis states in an introductory note, she found LeWitt’s “marks and presence completely encompassing” and became not only a “responder” but also a “partaker of both psyche and space.”

This sense of reverent communion is clarified by the book’s second part, which documents—through photographs along with diary entries, handwritten notations, and another short essay by Passehl—the creative results of Barberis’ three-month residency in 2019 at the Chester studio. The visit generated hundreds of works, many exploring ideas of “space,” “colour,” “objects,” and “intervals” or preserving a “documentary activity” such as “rubbing, tracing, [and] measuring.” Often using LeWitt’s tools and leftover paper, Barberis responded to the entire studio and its contents, including books and posters reproducing LeWitt’s art. She created whimsical variations of his sculptural maquettes and his well-known book Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974. Her approach was intensely multisensory and kinetic (reflecting her many years of dance training). Some works were inspired by listening to LeWitt’s cassette tapes, especially a recording of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. The resulting array of dash-like brushstrokes are reminiscent of LeWitt’s broken bands but even more colourful and often layered. Several pieces depend on a 360-degree experience of the studio, as well as its specific dimensions. As Long as Sol’s Table but Not as Wide, for example, was made by painting on a large sheet of paper while circumambulating the central worktable. Residue Series I and II were also produced on this table, their expansive paper sheets like strange architectural drawings with rectilinear and circular outlines mixed with random dots and brushstrokes: the accumulated clues to now missing objects and creative acts. Like everything Barberis made in Chester (including this remarkable and invaluable book), these works are thoroughly dependent on the site and its dynamics. They emerged from rituals befitting both an artist and a pilgrim—one travelling alone but immersed in a generous collaboration with a friend.

This review was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 67