Boundary takes the shape of the work it depicts: its fresco panel is arched at the top, the form of an altarpiece or an ancient doorway, echoing the tall vertical monument at the composition’s center. That monument, rising from a rugged landscape in muted blues, greens, and greys, is wrapped by a red line that runs the full height of the panel: a gesture of binding, or marking, or warning. The fresco surface makes the boundary feel very old.
Boundary takes the shape of the work it depicts: its fresco panel is arched at the top, the form of an altarpiece or an ancient doorway, echoing the tall vertical monument at the composition’s center. That monument, rising from a rugged landscape in muted blues, greens, and greys, is wrapped by a red line that runs the full height of the panel: a gesture of binding, or marking, or warning. The fresco surface makes the boundary feel very old.
The arched panel format places the work in a specific tradition: before perspective unified the picture plane into a coherent window, altarpiece painting organized its sacred content within shaped supports that were themselves architectural, the arched top echoing the rounded windows and doorways of medieval and Byzantine churches. Kitterle works in fresco, the medium of those churches; his panel takes their shape. The reference is not nostalgic but structural: the shaped support assigns the object a function that flat rectangular panels cannot quite claim, the sense that the boundary depicted is also enacted.
The red line running the full height of the panel is both a mark and a position, defining the field on either side: Barnett Newman's zip paintings use a single vertical for the same purpose, a boundary simultaneously compositional, spatial, and existential. Signorelli's eschatological frescoes in Orvieto, which Kitterle encountered during his 1996 exhibition in that city, organize their figures against architectural verticals with the same quality of permanence against dissolving ground. Boundary holds all three registers: the altarpiece shape, the Newman vertical, the Signorelli architecture, each asserting in its own way that something stands.
