DONALD KUSPIT Karen Gunderson's Black Kings

What an improvement on Ad Reinhardt!  The figure—the human self-image, as George Frankl calls it---disappeared into the blackness of his late painting, and re-emerges from the blackness of Karen Gunderson’s painting.  One can breathe a sigh of relief: life has not abdicated its throne to death, however pressed by death it may be.  What seemed lost forever never went away; it just hid in the depths.  Clearly blackness has come full circle from Reinhardt’s darkness—shadow to the nth degree—and were finally allowed to do so because they were as sacred and regal as it.  If Reinhardt’s blackness is an ironic cul de sac for abstraction, the Gunderson’s blackness breathes ironic new life into representation. 
For Matisse blackness played an “important part in color orchestration.”  It was as vital and musical as any color.  For Kandinsky it was a “silence with no possibility…something burnt out, like the ashes of a funeral pyre, something motionless like a corpse.”  Well, Gunderson’s enlightened kings—not just ordinary figureheads but inspired risktakers who used their authority and power for the welfare of other human beings, showing that the state can sometimes rise to the human occasion—are corpses that have become phoenixes, however charred they remain by “the silence of death” that blackness usually symbolizes, as Kandinsky noted. 

Moreover, instead of orchestrating blackness as one color among many, the way Matisse did, Gunderson orchestrates blackness itself.  Indeed, her paintings are miracles of musical blackness—monochrome played with Paganini-like virtuosity.  Made of thousands of gestures of black, sometimes melodically repeating, sometimes polyphonically at odds, they show the vitality possible with what seems inert an empty—a dangerous pit into which one can fall, a blank wall one comes up against, letting perception go no further.  Indeed, Gunderson is as courageous in her use of black as her kings were in their dark times.