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#13

Five feet wide by four feet tall, this maximally minimal and geometric oil painting by John McLaughlin is titled #13. Painted in 1962, it is a sheer panel perfectly divided down the middle by a hard boundary between white on the right and black on the left. They are as uniform and opposite as the squares on a machine-made checkerboard, and each extends virtually to the edge of the painting. But along the right edge the white meets a strip of black, and on the left the black meets an identically slender strip of white, so that white and black alternate across the panel, each boundary neatly parallel to the next. At the same time, the left and right strips, in their slender presence at the edge of the painting, seem to frame it, like margins or a picture frame. For moments, the painting seems simply and entirely white on the left and black on the right, and to float forward from the wall in the way of a 3D or stereoscopic image. The piece seems to demonstrate something about how brains make sense of what the eyes take in, but also works as décor. It ornaments and beautifies the wall it hangs on, despite its conceptual simplicity.