In Summer Fling, brightly colored geometric shapes, orange, turquoise, coral, and mint green, drift across a soft lavender ground as though subject to a different gravitational logic than the one that governs most paintings. The forms are irregular, roughly rectangular but tilted, overlapping at their edges, and the translucent layering in the overlaps adds a depth that the flat surfaces alone would not produce. The lavender field holds all of this buoyancy without strain.
In Summer Fling, brightly colored geometric shapes, orange, turquoise, coral, and mint green, drift across a soft lavender ground as though subject to a different gravitational logic than the one that governs most paintings. The forms are irregular, roughly rectangular but tilted, overlapping at their edges, and the translucent layering in the overlaps adds a depth that the flat surfaces alone would not produce. The lavender field holds all of this buoyancy without strain.
Canin’s approach here is adjacent to the tradition of Al Held and Burgoyne Diller, who both worked with color as structural material, building compositions from precisely placed geometric elements in which form and chromatic intensity were inseparable. But Canin’s forms are warmer, released from the grid’s discipline and allowed to suggest drift and delight. Charles Hinman, who introduced irregularly shaped canvas elements as objects in space, used visual tension as his primary instrument; Canin uses visual ease, forms that coexist without competition, the composition holding its equilibrium through the lavender field rather than through formal locking.
This painting dates from 1983, a decade after Canin’s most austere shaped-canvas period, and the relaxation is not a retreat from rigor but a different application of the same underlying principle: color and shape in direct relationship, nothing interpolated, the means kept to their essentials. The translucent overlaps introduce the only note of structural complexity, and they do so quietly, depth arriving as a byproduct of placement rather than as an argument.
