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Barrier

Barrier is Vilja Celmins’ oil and wax painting on linen made in 1985 and 1986. It is a near-perfect square, at six feet wide and only two inches short of six feet tall. The painting is a stark black field with hundreds of white and gray dots scattered about, all an inch or less in size. The dots are placed on the linen without a detectable pattern, like whatever stars might be visible through a telescope in a patch of night sky. Dots float solo, or in pairs, trios, or other clusters. The painting is not a naturalistic representation of the night sky where starbursts, or thin rays of light, stretch out from the round body of each star. And there are significantly fewer dots of light here than one would find using a telescope on a clear night. These differences make it much more like a recollection of a magazine photograph of stars than actual stars themselves.

Celmins manages to create an incredible sense of distance by playing with the dots’ sizes and with color. The largest are gleaming white, like bright little moons that feel very near. Only a few of the medium, small, or furthest-away tiny dots shine quite so brightly. Instead of applying white paint thickly to create the bright stars and more sparsely for the dimmer stars, she used white and a range of grays from a light blue-gray to a gray so dark it is hardly visible at all, until one gets up quite close to the artwork.

Barrier contains representations of only the tiniest fraction of what the cosmos contains, but looking at the painting gives a similar feeling to peering into a telescope. In both cases, the viewer is aware that so much more lies beyond the edges of the frame.